Deficit Tales: Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics

Let's talk about the federal deficit. Everybody seems to agree that it is a bugaboo, but no one is willing to give up anything to make it go away. Barack Obama said we need to do something about it back in 2006 while George W. Bush was spending us into oblivion. Now that Obama is president the deficit has soared to unprecedented heights...at least if you believe this graphic that has been circulating the Net:

My niece, who ought to know better, shard this on Facebook. The innocent are being led astray by blatant disregard for the truth.

The anti-Obama forces love this because it paints a picture of our president as not only a profligate spender but one who is unnaturally and, as the picture seems to evidence, smugly happy about it. Those more amenable to the President are not that happy with it because, among other things, it's not very accurate. The math doesn't work, and it leaves a lot of useful information on the editing room floor.

The amount of federal public debt handed over to the new administration at the end of George W. Bush's term was $10.7 Trillion. Of that, $6.3 Trillion was owed to the public and $4.4 Trillion was owed to other U.S. government agencies. The total public debt increased under the Bush administration from $5.7 Trillion in 2001 to $10.7 Trillion in December of 2008. As of February of this year (2012) the total public debt stood at $15.5 Trillion, an increase, so far, of $4.8 Trillion.

The Office of Management and the Budget (OMB) estimates that by the end of fiscal 2012 the gross federal debt will stand at $16.3 Trillion. This represents an increase of $5.6 Trillion, not the $6.5 Trillion depicted in the graphic.

The other problem, of course, is that if you're going to hold Obama responsible for running up the deficit with extravagant spending, then he better have bought something truly ridiculous. Here's a nice graph of where all that new deficit came from since Obama took office:

Makes you wonder where all Obama's 'Robin Hood Socialism' shows up. Listen carefully to the Republicans and you would have to believe that the Democrats gave the whole increased spending nut to lazy welfare cheats and old people who ought to stop draining the nation's resources and just die already.

So except for Tarp, the bailouts, and the stimulus spending, which together total about $1.5 Trillion, none of the deficit spending was initiated by Barack Obama. It all came from programs, policies, and two wars in place before he took office.

Here's another telling chart, this one from the July 23, 2011 edition of the New York Times Sunday Review, and based on data from the Congressional Budget Office and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. It is 'intellectual' as opposed to 'partisan.' That is, it does not spin blame, but rather pins spending to the origin of the policies that drive it.

Wow...looks like Obama has actually SLOWED non-defense discretionary spending and entitlement increases. No mean feat in an economy that the Republicans seem determined to hammer until the election is over. After that they'll make it even worse.

To me this shows the utter dishonesty of Republicans who cry about the deficits while refusing to acknowledge that the single most influential driver of deficit spending that has occurred during Obama's presidency is the Bush tax cuts. Not only do they refuse to acknowledge this indisputable fact, they want to add to the problem with even deeper tax cuts.

It doesn't make any sense to me that Mitt Romney and the Republicans hope to make their narrative stick, but stick it does in spite of the fact that it is a BALD-FACED-LIE. They are no longer accountable to the facts. Apparently they don't have to be.

They know hardly anyone will bother to check on the truthfulness of their assertions. There are too many facts to check, and it's too hard to separate the truth from the fiction. All a politician need do is keep repeating the story he wants to tell. When he's said it often enough it becomes true enough for the faithful who, after all, only believe what they want to believe.

Does anybody besides me long for the days when you could call a guy a liar, lay out the facts, and he'd be embarrassed by the dishonesty? Now the facts are just words streaming in the ether without effect or import.

Five Things to Consider before You Click 'Like' on a Political Post

Hold a lamp to the truth
and
drive slowly.

1. If you get most of your political news and analysis from the Comedy Channel, you probably have a world view that is at least as skewed as it would be if you got most of your information from Fox News. Jon Stewart, Steven Colbert, and Bill Maher may be smart guys, but they are first and foremost comics with a higher vested interest in laughs and ratings than in the truth. This is not to say that they are not often correct...just that being correct is not their primary aim...not unlike Fox.
2. If you agree with or, even worse, spout things like 'Republicans are waging war on women' or 'Democrats are waging war on religion' then you are guilty of exactly the same kind of fractious logic of which you are accusing the other side.
3. If you believe that the deficit mess is the result of welfare entitlements and paying people not to work, you need to turn off Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck and read a book about economics. I can recommend several that give a thoughtful and balanced account of what's really going on in the economy.
   1. 13 Bankers – Johnson and Kwak
   2. Freefall – Stiglitz
   3. End this Depression Now – Krugman
4. If you sincerely believe that Mitt Romney is a misogynistic white wonk who is hell-bent on asserting control over the nation's vaginae, or that Barack Obama is a Nigerian, Muslim, communist traitor determined to destroy America, then you are a narrow-minded dolt, incapable of appreciating either nuance or irony. These fellows hold opinions that differ from yours. That is all. They came by their opinions honestly and with consideration (and in Romney's case several times) which is more than I can say about you if you believe all the crap you hear from their opposition.
5. If you have more than 20 friends, and they all agree with you on everything you think is important, you are in danger of losing the kind of perspective that leads to compromise and progress. If you have more than 200 friends, you are already lost.

Hiatus - from the Latin for 'Save My Ass'

The Internet is in a sorry state. Strident liberals are calling Republicans nasty names, and insisting that conservatives want to control the nation's vaginas. Self-righteous conservatives are trying to characterize an honest difference of opinion on the morality of reproductive choices as a war on religion. With everyone focused on creating memorable sound bites to advance their cause, no one seems interested in the kind of civil discourse that could actually move us forward.

Obviously the nation needs me right now to set things straight. It's time for another of my long-winded posts. You know the type. You find they get tedious by the third paragraph, and your attention begins to flag. You skip to the end to see if I've made my point in summary so you don't have to read through all the boring folderol. You know you're going to get tired before I've come down firmly on one side or the other, determined as I am to give fair treatment to all sides. Eventually you just say to the screen, "Whatever..." and click over to Farmville or Words with Friends. I need to write one of 'those'.

Unfortunately I can't do that just now. I'm busy getting ready for a craft show in Orlando in a couple of weeks time. I've got photos to shop, prints to make, packages to assemble and displays to build. When it's over, with any luck, I'll also have money to count. Best not get ahead of myself though.

So I'm going to have to put off saving the world for a few weeks. I'm busy trying to save my financial ass, my self worth, and my sanity. I hope you understand.

The Ironic and the Furious: What I Want for Christmas

the President's offending 'holiday' greeting. mostly the GOP yawned. 

Two days ago MoveOn.org put up a post about the Republican reaction to the 2011 White House Christmas card. The headline read, 'Republicans Are Furious About Obama's Christmas Card? Wait Till They See Reagan's'. Those who thought to comment were mostly incensed that conservative pundits, GOP luminaries, and Tea Party Hacks were so petty that they would actually be furious about something as innocuous as a greeting card. What seemed to escape many of those commenting is the irony of being themselves so petty that they would get incensed over something that didn't really happen.

According to the article the only Republican who expressed any reservations about the card was Sarah Palin. She made her comments on Fox Radio. What she said was that she found it 'odd' that the President's Christmas card would highlight the family dog rather than traditional Christmas values like 'family, faith, and freedom'. Palin was clearly not furious. She was not even very judgmental...at least not compared to her usual standards. MoveOn's headline, in other words, was inflammatory, divisive, and untrue—the very charges that so many leveled against the GOP leadership, who apparently remain blissfully unaware that they are embroiled in a flap.

Personally I don't think that Christmas is a very good time to be sowing the seeds of hate and recrimination. I know that both sides do it, but the fact is that there are a lot of Democrats who think that only Republicans are capable of this kind of duplicity. Clearly this is not the case, and clearly many liberal believers are ready to be seduced into making the same kinds of unthinking blanket indictments of which they accuse the conservatives. I'm not letting conservatives off the hook here. They are not only just as guilty of this kind of flimflammery, they practically invented it.

Wouldn't it be great if we could get back to actually discussing real issues with logic and civility? Wouldn't it be useful if politicians and hacks would lay out their positions so that we voters could make informed decisions from a substantive array of facts? Wouldn't it be interesting if the media would delve into the meat of differing political positions instead of focusing on who changed their mind about what or who had a bad hair day or who left Jesus off their Christmas card? Wouldn't it be a 'Wonderful Life', if politics could actually make a difference?

That's what I want from Santa—a great big bag of political relevance. We could all use a little. Even a little would be a sea change...but oh, so welcome. 

Occupy Wall Street Occupies National Stage

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 I've been watching the Occupy Wall Street protest in a kind of bemused and detached way since it started. They have yet to look serious or come up with a thoughtful, viable agenda. Their one saving grace up till now has been, in the words of Paul Krugman of the New York Times, that 'they are angry at the right people'.

So I like them—this great unwashed rabble of campers and activists—even though they seem to ricochet from issue to issue like amped up pinballs without understanding anything fully, or even adequately. Why do I like them? Because the enemy of my enemy is my friend. They may not understand what they are doing, but they are down there in the financial district making trouble and impeding traffic and generally pissing off the Wall Street establishment. That's almost enough for me.

Things are beginning to change though. Occupy Wall Street is gathering momentum as a movement, and in no small measure due to the over-reaction of the police sent to maintain order and the screeching condemnations coming from conservative pundits and financial commentators on the usual cable outlets.

The protestors are still largely an unfocused mob with no clear agenda, but their persistence, their omnipresence on social media, and the ridiculous posturing of their detractors have given them an air of legitimacy. Lately, even Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner, and President Obama have separately expressed philosophical empathy with the protest, if not in principle, at least with their level of frustration. '...Who can blame them?' Bernanke quipped. Well, seemingly a lot of people can blame them, but most of that blame is apparently going to come from the political right.

Indeed. Bernanke's rhetorical question is doubly curious in that one of the more consistent calls of the protest is for the complete and immediate dismantling of the Federal Reserve Bank. Bernanke will be out of a job if the protestors have their way and, given the timbre of some of the attendant tweets and rally signs coming out of the protests, he just might be tarred, feathered, and carried out of town on a rail in the bargain. Obama's remarks are more obviously self-serving, and that, to my thinking, is as problematic as the condemnations from the right because the protest is and ought to stay apolitical.

The initial Occupy Wall Street narrative went something like this: Wall Street greed and corruption have robbed us of our future. They have tanked the economy, cost millions of jobs, stripped us of the value that used to give us comfort in our homes and our retirement accounts. They have undermined our worth as individuals and as a nation. They have made us less secure, less safe, more vulnerable. When they had brought the whole financial system to the edge of collapse, they reached into our pockets yet again and got us to rescue them from their own folly. Now, while the rest of us are still trying to crawl out of the smoking ruins they left us, they are back to their old tricks, unchastened, unrepentant, and unrelenting in the pursuit of the rest of our happiness. This is a huge injustice that needs to be fixed, and we are going to camp here and raise a ruckus until somebody does something about it.

This is not a political narrative, although many seem tempted to make it one. The Wall Street pirates donate almost equally to both major political parties. There is a reason for this, and the first Occupiers of Wall Street seemed to understand as much.

Politicians on both sides of the aisle share the blame for the paucity of regulation and fiscal licentiousness that got us into this mess. While Democrats are held by Republicans to be the party of profligate spending, the deficit rose most dramatically under Republican administrations. And while Republicans are widely thought to be the party that champions the worst excesses of corporate America, some of the most egregiously enabling deregulation took place under Democrats. Our problems are not rooted in political ideology. They are rooted in a system whose controls were deliberately broken in exchange for political contributions and support made to both parties by what Matt Tabbai of Rolling Stone calls a new Grifter Class.

These thieves are the real enemy, and they have co-opted our democratic processes and our institutions for their own gain. What they do is not just greedy, not just larcenous. It is, in my opinion, treasonous. They have done more damage to this nation than any terrorist organization. They have undermined our strength, weakened our influence, stripped us of our freedom, and all without recourse to any ideological framework. They are not political. They are criminal. They use politics, to be sure, but only as a means to an end. The larger political issues of left versus right, progressive versus conservative, the tensioned balance between individual rights and majority rule mean nothing to them. Their only concern is have or have not.

The Occupy Wall Street protestors think this is wrong. They may be a raucous mob at this point. They may even, as conservative commentator Michelle Malkin has suggested, smell bad. There's no doubt they have expressed some crazy notions, some of them self-contradictory, but this is always a danger when you have deliberately tried to remain leaderless and organically democratic. One could level many of the same criticisms against that other infamous grass-roots protest movement—the Tea Party. Personally I think there is something to like about both groups. They each have legitimate grievances.

The danger is that all this unfocused frustration is easily co-opted by politics. Certainly the Tea Party has come to be identified with a kind of fundamental rebublican libertarianism. Now MoveOn.org is busy trying to marshal the energy of the Occupy Wall Street groups. This is a shame, really. There is much to like about the fact that the initial anger of the movement has been directed at real pirates and charlatans. The environment that made the piracy legal was created in Washington by Democrats and Republicans alike. The solutions to the problems are actually quite simple and even fairly well known, but they will have to be addressed with the same kind of bi-partisan co-operation that created them in the first place. Playing us versus them with these movements will just muddy the waters and delay any chance of real reform.