Unlike Tom, I’ve lost interest in mocking Megan McArdle. I will say, though, that correcting Megan’s McMath on the Iraq war as a percentage of GDP was by far the most fun thing I’ve ever done on this blog. The sweetest part was that she wanted to credit Brad DeLong rather than me, even though I pointed out the mistake to her half a dozen times, because being corrected by a well-known economist isn’t as humiliating as being corrected by an anonymous idiot on a blog known for pet pictures and profanity. There’s no way you can slide by with a “Tyler Cowen counters via Greg Mankiw that even though the math is wrong there’s still a strong Hayekian argument that the point is right” when you’re arguing with Balloon-Juice.
It is amazing to me how shamelessly idiots like Jacob Weisberg and Andrew Sullivan use pseduo-intellectual subterfuge to hide the fact that they are lazy, innumerate sociopaths. Krugman finds Weisberg admitting that he was too fucking lazy or stupid to look at the numbers in Paul Ryan’s budget….
After my last column, I got pummeled in the liberal blogosphere for asserting that the Ryan budget represented a big step in the direction of conservative honesty. I deserved some of the abuse. Though I criticized Ryan for his unsupported rosy assumptions (shame on you, Heritage Foundation hacks), I reacted too quickly and didn’t sort out just how laughable Ryan’s long-term spending projections were. His plan projects an absurd future, according to the Congressional Budget Office, in which all discretionary spending, now around 12 percent of GDP, shrinks to 3 percent of GDP by 2050. Defense spending alone was 4.7 percent of GDP in 2009. With numbers like that, Ryan is more an anarchist-libertarian than honest conservative.
….and then inexplicably using this quasi-apology to write another piece about how courageous and good Paul Ryan is.
And Weisberg doesn’t care that Krugman mocks him for it, because he can feel that he’s been corrected by a master, no shame in that.
mclaren
Since U.S. military spending is currently 10% of GDP, his numbers are obviously garbage.
The 4.7% of GDP number can only be obtained by deleting lots of basic military spending from the military budget and pretending it doesn’t exist:
1) Military pensions – 76 billion
2) The VA – 73 billion
3) “Black” projects – 50 billion
4) CIA – 52 billion
5) NRO (military
satellites) – 50 billion
6) NSA – 50 billion
…and so on. The claim that U.S. military spending amounts to only 4.7% of GDP is a laughable and foolish lie.
Villago Delenda Est
There are so many iconic Village Idiots, it seems to be pointless to add Weisberg to the list, but, there he is, in all his moronic glory.
Stillwater
Well, you know the old adage: One mans lazy innumerate sociopathic subterfuger is another mans serious and brave leader guy.
Villago Delenda Est
@mclaren:
Every fucking dime in the VA budget should be counted as “defense” spending, because it’s a consequence of the creation and maintenance of a war machine.
Don’t like spending on veterans benefits? Don’t create veterans. It’s really rather simple.
Jamey: Bike Commuter of the Gods
This.
The Political Nihilist Formerly Known as Kryptik
@Stillwater:
Fixed.
Just Some Fuckhead
There are many more of us than there are of them.
schrodinger's cat
Why is our village idiots so numerically illiterate?
DougJ@top
Can you suggest a beginner/intermediate level book on graph theory? I is interested in complex networks and attempts to use statistical mechanics to study them. Put I knowz no graph theory or topology.
Stillwater
@The Political Nihilist Formerly Known as Kryptik: the village’s serious and brave leader guy.
Is it like the Village version of The Right Stuff.
schrodinger's cat
@Stillwater: Paul Ryan is Justin Beiber to the tween village punditubbies.
Edited for clarity.
Elia Isquire
You and K-Thug both skipped over my favorite part of the Weisberg piece:
Good thing he told me the definition, because otherwise I might’ve thought that was a ridiculous phrase with no provenance and built upon a mountain of High Broder sand!
taylormattd
This simply must be entered into the rotating description of Balloon Juice:
Stillwater
@Elia Isquire: reactionary liberalism.
I smell a new meme coming down the pike: reactionary progressivism.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
That’s because well-known economists don’t pull people’s arms out of their sockets when they
losewin. Foul-mouthed pet blogs have been known to do that.Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
is using the word “innumerate” like the blogga version of hipsters drinking pbr?
Comrade DougJ
@schrodinger’s cat:
I don’t know of any of the top of my head, I know there are supposed to be a lot of good introductory books in this area though.
Jim C.
Definition of Sociopath: “a person, as a psychopathic personality, whose behavior is antisocial and who lacks a sense of moral responsibility or social conscience.”
(Source: Dictionary.com)
This does not apply to Sullivan. Say what you will about him being lazy and making snap judgments, and defaulting to praising conservatives and bashing liberals, but his writings are not consistent with sociopathy.
Examples of his having a moral compass include:
1. Repeatedly and continually writing about the outrages of torture, including lambasting folks who try and hide behind the “enhanced interrogation techniques” euphemism.
2. Repeatedly and continually writing about the decades long cover up by the Catholic church of their child abuse scandals.
3. Repeatedly and continually writing about the racism behind the “birther” movement.
4. Being more obsessed than any other blogger I can think of with exposing the innumerable lies of one Sarah Palin.
I could go on, but you get the drift.
This is not an unqualified defense of him. For all his good qualities (and he does have them, most prominent being an ability to admit being wrong when the facts are rubbed in his face, even if, as with McMegan, he usually goes right back to trusting the exact same people who just bamboozled him) he does continually make some head scratching comments.
Such as this one here where he manages to list Bachmann as an ANTI-BIRTHER because she was thoroughly skewered on national television and forced to admit that birtherism has been debunked.
Sorry Andrew, no credit for someone who has used dog whistles on this for months and finally admits that it is time to move on.
schrodinger's cat
@Comrade DougJ: Any suggestions about authors? I want it to be less mathy and more applications oriented. I am not in a hurry since it won’t be until the middle of May that I can do anything about it.
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
@Villago Delenda Est:
to be fair, every bit of the social safety net not directly involving seniors should also be part of the defense appropriations.
lets be honest about how we really make soldiers in this country.
then there will be no controversy about it, it’s defense spending.
see i am an ideas guy, and a problem solver, i have upper management potential.
Comrade DougJ
@Jim C.:
Fair enough, he’s not a sociopath. I am genuinely saddened by the direction he’s taken recently, because in many ways I admire his blogging.
Comrade DougJ
@Comrade DougJ:
I would take a look at some of the Dover books on it. They’re cheap and likely to be “classics” of some sort.
Elia Isquire
@Jim C.: He’s not a clinical sociopath, but rather when it comes to the plight of the poor or women or racial minorities in specific cases and as the consequence of policies — not as Burkean first principles or abstractions — he at times shows a lack of empathy.
ETA: And to echo Comrade above, in the past 3 weeks the amount I read him has probably declined by somewhere around 60%. Hopefully he’ll get off this austerity-for-its-own-sake jihad sometime in the near future.
BGinCHI
@Stillwater: Smells like Jonah Goldberg spirit.
John Cole
A.) What is wrong with pet pictures and profanity?
B.) Take a moment and reflect on how lucky we all are that Broder died before the Ryan plan was released.
BTD
Great great post.
This is the story of the last 8 years of the blog wars against the Media.
Jim C.
@Comrade DougJ:
For me, a good way to think of him is to consider him as being analogous to a large, eager, not-quite-housebroken and excitable puppy dog.
He’s going to have plenty of times where he makes you smile as his enthusiasm and unrestrained nature leads him to do very entertaining and applause worthy things. The very things that sometimes cause you to roll your eyes are also part of his endearing qualities.
On the other hand, you still need to watch him closely and be ready to whack him on the nose with a rolled up newspaper when he misbehaves from time to time.
It’s my hope that enough whacks with a rolled up newpaper on the nose will eventually break him of some of his worse habits. With time and patience, he may yet grow into a well-mannered guard dog to bark and sound the alarm on his fellow conservatives when they’re being batshit crazy and breaking stuff WITHOUT the annoying puppy habits.
Brachiator
Once pundits successfully create an image for a politician, it often sticks, no matter how laughably ludicrous the image might be.
Fer instence, Grampa McCain is doing a photo op in Libya because he is, obviously, an expert on military affairs. It must be so, because a Village Idiot wrote about it once upon a time.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal:
Or better yet, in lieu of adequate Medicare coverage why don’t we just draft the elderly into the military? All those years of watching Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy should come in handy sitting at a desk waiting for just the right time to push the button on the Predator Drone’s Hellfire missile. And as a bonus, they’ve already been to lots of weddings, so they know which ones look good and which don’t.
Uloborus
It’s truthiness, Mister J. He KNOWS Paul Ryan is a good man and responsible and whatever else in his GUT. Facts don’t change how he feels, so all he has to do is a little rationalization to bring him back around to the decision he already made!
Unfortunately, this is basic human nature and our side has a fair amount of it. The facts don’t matter, only how you feel about an issue. But the conservative side of the block is ruled by it these days and a ‘reasonable conservative’ is just someone who’s highly skilled at that rationalizing.
reggieT
” …how shamelessly idiots like Jacob Weisberg and Andrew Sullivan use pseduo-intellectual subterfuge to hide the fact that they are lazy, innumerate sociopaths.”
nice. What a clever and mean-spirited way to say absolutely nothing of substance. You should congratulate yourself more than you already have in this post.
One thing that’s interesting about this blog, aside from its McCardle and Bobo fetishes (I’m not sure why these people are so important), is how dogmatic the economics posts are here, and the way some inconvenient factors are conveniently ignored. For instance, today in Tom Levenson’s post, we got this:
“if we assume a balanced budget…” Interesting, how do we arrive at that assumption? It seems to be an accepted Balloon Juice truth that entitlements like Medicare are unassailable, although I never see anyone explain how these programs remain solvent. In what imaginary universe do we have a balanced budget, now or going forward? Even his assertion about the Clinton balanced budget is dubious if you dig into the numbers and account for the paying of public debt through raiding the Social Security trust.
I have yet to see a balanced argument on this site regarding entitlements, although snark is quite impressive.
Joel
Was Jacob Weisberg the one that said that George Orwell would bash Obama supporters? I think he was.
schrodinger's cat
@Comrade DougJ: Thanks for the suggestion I will look into it.
Elia Isquire
@reggieT: I’m going to need s’more right-wing talking points and intentional obtusity next time, but this was an OK effort.
schrodinger's cat
@reggieT: How is Medicare an entitlement when my paycheck is being deducted for my contribution?
Uloborus
@reggieT:
The answer, which I’ll grant you is frequently covered by snark, is that the ‘entitlement’ system is an inadequate safety net as it is, so merely cutting it would be a disaster, both for the economy and in terms of human suffering.
The answer is A) stop cutting our friggin’ revenues. That will help a lot. But B) *only* bringing medical costs under control will fix this issue in the long term. Thus the importance of the ACA, which is the first serious stab at that. If you do not fix medical costs but merely shift the burden to the individual, you’re telling the vast majority of Americans that soon they will not be able to afford medical care at all.
The Ryan plan does not address this issue in any way. Nor does it actually reduce the deficit, except by assuming that trickle-down economics – thoroughly disproven both in theory and practice – will result in a period of economic prosperity beyond anything anyone previously imagined. Whether or not we have a specific alternative, the least of our positions is a more honest and effective attempt to deal with the debt and with the long-term weaknesses of ‘entitlements’ than Ryan’s plan. We are thus quite at liberty to mock him and anyone who supports him.
And again, let me remind you that while we as plebian non-experts are hazy on the details, our side DOES have suggestions to deal with the long-term challenge of medical costs, which is the only real hole in the system. The ACA is abundant proof of that, and it is only a half-measure.
Elia Isquire
@Joel: He probably would, though. He was a grumpy SOB.
Stillwater
@Elia Isquire: Yeah, I agree. There was some hippie-kicking right up front, to set the tone, which definitely earns style points. Followed by some number crunching to dispel the illusion that all conservatives are innumerate. That earns effort points. But the final dig at ‘not seeing a balanced post’ on this at BJ warrants deductions for lazy sociopathic subterfuge.
I give it a 7.8.
MKJ
You say you have lost interest in Megan McArdle but you had some fun recently in pointing out that, contra what she says, 4% of GDP is not a small increase in taxes for a certain increase in tax rates. So you might be interested in knowing that these days she is making the argument in reverse:
SRW1
@John Cole:
ad A) nothing, which is why taylormattd is right, “a blog known for pet pictures and profanity” needs to be elevated to a rotating tag.
ad B) Please, non jinxing anything here. It’s the Easter weekend and I hear that has something to do with resurrection!
Stillwater
@MKJ: She really takes that assymmetric information thing to heart: her thoughts on these matters only go one way.
PeakVT
@reggieT: I have yet to see a balanced argument on this site regarding entitlements,
What the fuck is a “balanced” argument, and why of all blogs in the intertubes do you expect BJ to provide you with one?
mclaren
Sullivan certainly shows a near-autistic lack of empathy on a lot of policy issues. On other policy issues, he seems reasonably humane.
The guy seems to have a blind spot. Torture is bad but starving malnourished kids and old people to pay for endless unwinnable foreign wars is fine; pricing AIDS medications out of reach is morally repugnant but praising a political hack who lies outright about budget numbers is morally admirable.
It’s a weird mix. Sullivan (like so many other pundits) seems devoid of conscience when he likes a government or corporate policy, but he becomes a pillar of morality when a government or corporate policy meets with his disapproval.
evinfuilt
@John Cole:
A) Nothing is wrong, if we didn’t like that combo we wouldn’t be on this website.
B) But he was so serious, and he lost out on his serious chance to call Paul “Mr Serious” Ryans Plan serious. Seriously, we lucked out on that one.
reggieT
@Uloborus
I think that’s a reasonable answer, thanks. Just to be clear, like most here I think the Ryan plan sucks.
@schrodinger’s cat
Are you thinking that Medicare money is sitting in a trust somewhere waiting for you? How about your Social Security money? I suggest a bit of research on unfunded future liabilities related to Medicare. It’s in the tens of trillions of dollars.
Jim C.
@Elia Isquire:
Everyone tends to have their own personal blind spots that are tough to get past. I definitely agree that Andrew is not where folks like you and I are at in the areas that you describe.
If he was, he’d be a liberal. He’s not. What makes him frustrating at times is that he’s so extreme in the reactions he provokes. When he’s on the money, he is ON THE DAMN MONEY, with his comments to the point it makes his readers want to stand up and cheer. (Such as when he, if I remember right, very firmly denounced the demagoguery and racism behind the “9/11 masque”.
When he whiffs on an issue though, he doesn’t tend to be off by a little bit. He tends to be WAY off. (Such as his praise and love for the Ryan plan initially, though he’s definitely softened his stance since.)
This is both frustrating and a little entrancing to watch. You keep reading for the gems, but then find yourself throwing up your hands in disgust when he falls for the same sort of arguments from the same group of people he ended up backtracking on in the previous debate. It’s like watching someone go back to an abusive relationship time and again thinking that THIS TIME will be different.
In my opinion, he’s actually very similar to many independent voters in a lot of ways. He’s often quick to catch on to the more obvious examples of GOP extremism and never shy in denouncing them, but frequently bamboozled when they make the slightest attempts to cover up or spin their corruption and mean-spiritedness.
This is very frustrating because he comes across, always, as so well intentioned. Since he is, when he DOES get bamboozled it is more than a little dangerous due to the size of his audience.
Villago Delenda Est
No one who has a trust fund has the slightest right to opine about the “entitlements” of others.
Especially the heir to millions asshole Pete Peterson.
Joel
@Elia Isquire: Certainly, but the point was stupid trollery. Orwell has zero relevance to US politics, especially as Weisberg sees them.
schrodinger's cat
@reggieT: I see you did not answer my question but spewed some right wing talking points instead.
Elia Isquire
@Stillwater: The citing of the zombie lie that the surplus was’t really a surplus was worth a golf-clap, too.
@Joel: Oh, totally. I read Weisberg’s The Bush Tragedy years ago, and it was actually pretty good — but everything else he’s ever done has been High Village.
Comrade DougJ
@reggieT:
So your snarking about our snark *is* productive, though our snarking about elite media mathematical mistakes is not productive?
I don’t follow you.
Update. Did you used to comment here as “glasnost”? You sound like him, strangely arrogant and humorless.
Davis X. Machina
Nay, rather the opposite. He actually thinks. Post-facto, yes. Not all the way through, yes. But he thinks.
The lion’s share of independent voters are ignorant, unreflective sheep who vote narrative, ‘personality’ (the manufactured one, of a figure they’ve never met), region, etc.
Weisberg, Sully et al. is what you get when you’re lucky.
Good luck trying to sleep.
eemom
how in the name of God is it possible for you people to never tire of psychoanalyzing Sullivan???
Yer fuckin crazy, all of you.
Comrade DougJ
@Elia Isquire:
Reading that made my head hurt.
Elia Isquire
@Jim C.: Good analysis. He is quite like mythic and valued Independent Voter. And you’re right about him being so enormously hit and miss — it’s why I both keep coming back and get so friggin’ annoyed when he’s wrong. I also think he defends/cites a lot of odious charlatans, like Niall Ferguson, because they’re friends…but that’s another story…
But on the Ryan thing, and on Austerity in general, he’s been super all-over-the-place. If you go through his posts on just the Ryan plan it’s almost schizophrenic in tone.
mclaren
@reggieT:
Then you haven’t read anything I’ve ever posted, and you haven’t read anything Corner Stone has ever posted, and you haven’t read most of what DougJ or Mistermix or most of the other front-pagers have posted.
All of us have been saying for years that the growth in medicare spending is unsustainable. All of us have been saying for years that military spending is the single biggest entitlement program in the U.S. government, and that the growth in U.S. military spending is unsustainable (up 8% this year alone in a zero core inflation environment, which equates to a doubling time of 9 years).
All of us have been saying for years that a whole bunch of government programs, loosely known as “entitlements” must cut their spending — but the way to cut that spending is not to just throw people into the street and let ’em get sick ‘n die, or shut down all the Pell grants and tell all the young people to stop going to college because they can’t afford it anymore.
The solution to cutting spending on medicare is to get health care costs under control in America. That’s been done in other countries. It’s not rocket science. The solution is well known. Every other advanced country in the world has done. We have models we can follow in England, in France, in Germany, in Japan, in the Netherlands, in Sweden, in Canada. This isn’t solving nonlinear elliptic integral equations by numerical approximation using a Runge-Kutte predictor corrector method; that’s hard. This is easy. We know how to do it.
The key to a balanced discussion of what are known as “entitlements” and which should and must include the biggest entitlement of all, military spending, involves the recognition that you can’t control costs without systemic reform.
Tinkering around the edges of things like medicare won’t work. It won’t work because ultimately medicare costs are driven by the underlying cost of delivering medical care in America, and that’s exploding out of control because the U.S. medical-industrial complex uses a dysfunctional system to delivery medical care.
Making assumptions about future economic growth in the U.S. economy remains dicey. No one seems to have factored in Peak Oil. No one seems to have noticed that America is rapidly approaching a point where at least 6 different unsustainable policy trends are going to crash together and leave the U.S. economy in wreckage unless something serious is done and soon.
“Something serious” means that we can’t continue the policy of [1] letting college costs escalate without limit forever while continuing to make college loans undischargable through bankruptcy; [2] letting military spending increase without limit forever to pay for unwinnable foreign wars that never end; [3] letting the U.S. tax base erode by constantly offshoring every middle-class American job to third-world countries without limit; [4] letting U.S. medical costs explode exponentially forever by using a piecemeal fee-for-service profit-based fragmented set of corrupt collusive cartels and monopolies to delivery health care; [5] gutting infrastructure and basic science R&D spending to lower levels every year; [6] ignoring Peak Oil while letting our oil imports skyrocket without limit.
If you look at why Medicare is in so much trouble, it’s a complex mix of all these unsustainable trends. If we cut America’s current 1.45 trillion dollar a year military spending by 80%, our current U.S. budget deficit would vanish and all the problems with funding medicare would go away tomorrow. If America stopped its dependence on foreign oil, the U.S. economy’s growth rate would jump up and everyone would experience an immediate and significant increase in their personal incomes and there wouln’t be any problem in paying for medicare. If people didn’t exit college with crushing burdens of hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt that can never be discharged by bankruptcy, paying for health insurance wouldn’t be the problem it is today. If we reformed America’s medical-industrial complex to a single-payer nationalied system like Canada’s, the cost of medical care in America would simply become a non-issue.
This is a balanced discussion of entitlement reform. Social security doesn’t have a problem; it’s in fine shape, at least for the next 40 years, and making economic projection beyond 40 years in the future is a fool’s game, so it’s not worth worrying about. It’s only Medicare that’s got a problem.
You just haven’t been paying attention to the balanced discussion of entitlement reform that’s been going on here for years.
eemom
the use of the word “entitlement” is right up there with admiration for Ayn Rand as the litmus test for an asshole.
mclaren
@eemom:
Sully is the Hannibal Lecter of bloggers: he’s endlessly fascinating, in a horrible way.
“Come closer, Clarisse,” says Sullivan…and we do.
eemom
not to me he ain’t.
TheYankeeApologist
@McLaren #55 –
Wow. The near-constant takedowns of Sully and McArdle around here are pretty epic, but you just evisicerated that guy. I kind of feel bad for him.
burnspbesq
@schrodinger’s cat:
Tufte’s “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information” may not be the right book for what you’re after, but it’s a book that every person who wants to call themselves “educated” should have read.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Comrade DougJ: I’ll hurrt your head, Master Troll.
Stillwater
@Hermione Granger-Weasley: Welcome aboard the train, HG-W/M_C: now you know what all the rest of us already understand.
Good work!
Comrade DougJ
@mclaren:
Very good point.
schrodinger's cat
@mclaren: He is not all that fascinating, in fact he is rather boring, he loves to go on and on about his pet subjects; RC Church, beards and bears, true conservatism, Palin, legalizing marijuana, and his latest man crush, Ryan.
JGabriel
DougJ @ Top:
Balloon Juice: 4Chan for post-adolescence.
Edited To Add: I mean that in a good way.
.
Mark S.
Does Weisberg read Slate? I wouldn’t blame him if he didn’t, because it’s mostly a horrible site, but he might have stumbled across this: How Congress can balance the budget in eight years by literally doing nothing.
Mnemosyne
@reggieT:
By raising taxes on people who make more than $250K a year.
By raising taxes on people who make more than $250K a year.
Contrary to the claims of the Tea Partiers, taxes in the US are the lowest in modern history. We could solve a whole bunch of our problems if we had a rational tax policy, but we can’t because millionaires and billionaires have managed to convince people living on Social Security that they’ll totally be millionaires themselves one day so they shouldn’t increase taxes on people who make $25 million a year.
To use the Republicans’ favorite household metaphor, what do you advise someone to do who’s drowning in credit card debt? Do you tell them to cut back on their hours at work because they need to have less income? Or do you tell them to work overtime or get a second job so they can increase their income and pay off the debt?
We will not be able to fix our debt problem without raising taxes. That’s reality. Unfortunately, we have an entire political party in this country that’s unable to face reality and can only march around chanting about entitlements! Death panels! Kenyans!
reggieT
@mclaren
I think that was an excellent balanced argument, thanks, and I pretty much agree with all of it.
@Comrade DougJ
Just because I don’t refer to people as shameless idiots and lazy, innumerate sociopaths doesn’t mean I lack a sense of humor. I don’t agree with everything Sullivan says, but is he really an idiot and a sociopath?
I’m not glastnost.
@schrodinger’s cat
I don’t care whether we use the word “entitlement” in relation to Medicare or not. I’ll stop using the word altogether. Let’s just call it unfunded future federal liabilities.
As for me spewing right wing talking points, not my intention. I haven’t voted for a republican in decades. But to clarify, what part of what I said isn’t true regarding future unfunded liabilities?
Emma
Mclaren: Sully is the Hannibal Lecter of bloggers: he’s endlessly fascinating, in a horrible way.
Not even close. I have absolutely no interest in the mutterings of that misogynistic upper-crust-wannabe arse.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Stillwater: shall i reprint some of your comments from the LoOG?
I could be wrong, but it doesn’t exactly look to me like you and Elia are pointing and laughing.
reggieT
@Mnemosyne
I agree with raising taxes on the wealthiest, but that alone won’t adequately fund Medicare into the future, not even close given current projections.
Uloborus
@reggieT:
I personally rarely indulge even in snark and don’t like the angry name-calling here – but hey, they weren’t kidding about the ‘vitriolic jackals’ part and I find the reason buried amongst the anger more than reward enough to hang around. If name-calling ain’t my thing, they’re not obligated to argue the way that matches my personal tastes.
As for the unfunded liabilities, much of the emotion against you is being driven by the way the right wing has distorted this issue almost beyond recognizability. If you say even the most reasonable thing in the world but frame it in terms we’re used to from the Right, you provoke anger. It’s not pointless anger. Those terms – like ‘entitlements’ – and questions were chosen specifically to make it sound as if the safety net is a wasteful thing that can only be fixed by removal. The truth, which you seem to acknowledge, is that it’s something crucially important that has problems which need addressing. Alas, it’s hard to address them when the opposition is screaming at the top of their lungs to remove the safety net altogether. Fighting back against that catastrophic plan takes all of your attention.
Xantar
@Mark S.:
That’s snark, right? Weisberg is the former editor in chief of Slate.
reggieT
@Uloborus
I appreciate the comments, and understand the objections to the word “entitlement”.
@mclaren
On second look, one thing I’d like to add regarding military spending. I agree there are loads of potential budgetary savings there. However, even if it were politically and practically feasible to cut military spending by 80%, this spending does have a stimulatory effect on the economy, which translates into tax revenues. So cutting would not result in debt reduction equal to the cuts. Also, based on my understanding of Medicare projections, cutting $1 trillion from the budget would still fall short without other major changes to the way Medicare functions (such as finding ways to reduce medical costs).
TheYankeeApologist
@Uloborus:
Well put. There isn’t a whole lot of room for etiquette in a class war. Someone says the word “entitlement” or mentions how clever and brilliant “Atlas Shrugged” was, and I just hear “I hate your lack of wealth and want you to die of starvation or consumption, right after you finish emptying my wastebaskets.”
TheYankeeApologist
@reggieT:
Wait a minute. Doing things like buying a bomber or paying a soldier’s wages are things you can make that case for, but how is dropping bombs on random people in Libya or losing track of pallets full of money in Afghanistan stimulating our economy?
Elia Isquire
@reggieT: I was speaking most to the dig against Clinton’s surplus. Saying that the tech bubble proves it to be non-existent is a popular right-wing trope, and I thought that was where you were going — especially since SS was not “raided”…
Mark S.
@Xantar:
Then surely he read the Lowrey piece. Isn’t it sort of germane to what he’s discussing? It’s a little hard to argue we need bold! serious! new plans when doing nothing (i.e. letting the fucking Bush tax cuts finally expire) will practically balance the budget.
mclaren
@Mnemosyne:
That’s part of the solution. But it’s not the whole solution.
No one here seems familiar with geometric or exponential grwoth. Here’s the think about exponential growth: it starts slow but rapidly gets completely out of control.
If you look at CBO and GAO stats on medicare spending over the last 40 years, you find that it has grown at 4% faster than the rate of inflation consistently, year over year. 30 years ago or 20 years ago that wasn’t such a big concern because exponential functions have a growth rate proportional to their size. As long as the size of the bite medical care took out of U.S. GDP was small, the growth rate was slow enough not to get people worried.
But now medical spending is up to 16% of U.S. GDP and because medical costs are increasing exponentially, the growth rate is proportional to the amount of spending. There’s a good analogy to this. Think about a pond with a single lily pad: say the number of lily pads doubles every day. If it takes 30 days to fill the pond completely full of lily pads, on what day will the pond be half full?
Answer: on the 29th day.
We’re rapidly approaching that 29th day for the cost of medical care in America. 4% beyond the rate of inflation means a doubling time of 18 years. That doesn’t sound like much until you realize that this doubling means the percentage of GDP that gets burned up in providing medical care in America.
So in another 18 years this means 32% of U.S. GDP goes to medical care; in 36 years 64% of U.S. GDP goes to medical care…and in 54 years? 128% of U.D. GDP goes to medical care.
Guess what? It’s physically impossible for 128% of GDP to go into medical care. It can’t happen.
And long long before that 54 years is up, we’re going to be in huge trouble, because military spending already accounts for around 10% of GDP and social security spending accounts for another 6% of GDP. That’s 16% of GDP right there and if you add in 16% of GDP going to medical care, now you’ve got 32% of GDP. How long before we burn through 100% of GDP? Not very long. About 45 years.
But it’s even worse than that because right now core inflation is zero but medical costs are increasing by 6% per year. So the cost of medical care has accelerated sharply. The growth rate is not only exponential, but the exponent keeps increasing in size.
At a real growth rate of 6%, that’s a doubling time of 12 years.
Raising tax rate on people who make over $250,000 a year will capture at most about 300 billion extra dollars per year. That will pay for medicare for a few years, but not many. Very soon we’ll need more money — unless we reduce the rate of growth of medical costs in America.
Once again, that’s a necessary but not sufficient condition for getting a balanced budget. The main reason why the Clinton deficit vanished like dew in the morning is that we spent like drunken sailors of military-terror-police stuff in order to launch a bunch of endless foreign wars we can’t win and set up worthless agencies like the DHS (whose budget keeps doubling every 7 years) and the TSA. You can’t get a balanced budget without shutting down the endless foreign wars. Bill Clinton got a balanced budget only partly because he persuaded congress to raise taxes on the rich; Bill Clinton also refused to do someting insane and stupid like invading Iraq or sending hundreds of thousands of troops and building 300 bases in Afghanistan.
Not only that, America has by far the lowest taxes of any country in the first world. Our taxes are much lower than the taxes in Sweden or Britain or France or Germany. America is massively undertaxed by comparison with every other advanced nation on earth. That’s why our roads are full of potholes and our bridges are falling down and our college students are crushed with a lifetime burden of unendurable debt. Other advanced countries pay for these things, and their society benefits. Their societies become better and richer and more productive because they pay for decent roads and a decent education for their young people — America doesn’t, so we’re falling behind, our economy is faltering, foreign firms increasingly don’t want to do business here because we don’t have well-educated enough workers and our infrastructure is falling apart.
It’s baffling.
And ironically, college debt has now surpassed credit card debt in size as the single biggest debt problem for individuals in America. The middle class used to be crushed mainly by horrible 35%-interest-rate credit card rate; but today the middle class is being crushed primarily by horrible sky-high college loan debt that can never be discharged through bankruptcy.
The bottom 48% of Americans in the economic pyramid account for less than 0.3% of assets in America. We can’t fix our debt problems by raising taxes on those people. So we have to raise taxes on the rich. But even raising taxes on the rich to 99% won’t fix our debt problems if we keep spending 1.45 trillion dollars a year on endless unwinnable foreign wars and $1200 disposable plastic surgical instruments that cost $30 to manufacture.
There isn’t enough money in the universe to pay for billion-dollar B2 bombers and $50 cotton balls and $20 aspirin. We’ve got to cut the spending on these insane wasteful self-destructive wars and get medical costs under control, as well as raising taxes on the rich.
mclaren
@reggieT:
Here’s another balanced discussion: you’re right that military spending does add jobs and wealth to the economy. Dropping bombs on Libya stimulates the U.S. economy because the military contractors who build the bombs get paid, and in turn they buy things, so military spending ultimately stimulates aggregate demand, which boosts the overall economy.
But here’s the balanced part — econometric measurements show very clearly that military spending generates far fewer jobs per dollar spent than domestic spending. And there’s no mystery why.
Take a simple example: a factory builds a refrigerator. The refrigerator gets bought by a restaurant, which turns around and uses that fridge to store food which then gets sold for a profit as fancy meals. The fridge not only generates revenue the first time as a profit for the manufacturer that built it, the fridge also generates a second profit from the restaurant. And if you follow it through and figure some business guys had a business lunch at that restaurant which helped them close a deal, then you get even more profit generated indirectly from the sale of that refrigerator. So domestic economic production has a knock-on effect that generates a positive-feedback effect, with multiple levels of boost to the economy.
By contrast, if you build a bomb and drop it on Libya, there’s only the one-time profit generated by manfuacturing the bomb. Then, nothing. No virtuous cycle, no knock-on effect.
That’s why making military spending such a buge percentage of GDP is such a bad idea, aside from the fact that it turns America into a militarized quasi-garrison state with no civil liberties and a military-style everyone-must-march-in-lockstep-and-never-question-the-leader mindset. Military spending actually steals jobs from our economy compared to domestic spending.
We used to understand this in America.
[Dwight D. Eisenhower, “The Chance for Peace,” speech made in 1953]
Villago Delenda Est
@mclaren:
A lot of the expense in our health care system is to provide profit for cancer tumors.
It’s really that damn simple in overall concept, but of course, as you plough into the details, it becomes overwhelming.
So we’ll ignore that, and starve granny.
reggieT
@TheYankeeApologist
I agree that military spending is an inefficient and non-productive form of stimulus, and that we’d be better off in the long run economically by drawing military spending down dramatically. Nonetheless, a trillion dollars of military spending does play a large role in the economy and tax receipts. Reducing that spending quickly would also bring down government revenues significantly.
@Elia Isquire
While Clinton went to great effort to balance the budget, it is worth noting that federal government borrowed money from the Social Security trust, which was running a surplus. The loans from the Social Security trust are not considered public debt. Also, although Clinton was a much better economic steward than Bush, his administration bears responsibility for excessive deregulation of Wall Street, and pursuing a nominally free trade agenda that has resulted in the export on many American jobs. Please note the lack of right wing talking points…
reggieT
@mclaren
yes, absolutely.
Mnemosyne
@reggieT:
The problems with Medicare are not primarily funding problems. The problems exist because we spend more for healthcare than any other industrialized country in the world. MRIs cost more here. Hospital stays cost more. Drugs cost more.
Without controlling the costs of healthcare in this country, we could raise taxes to 100% of any income over $250K and we still wouldn’t solve the problem. But to say that it’s useless to increase taxes at all because it won’t automatically solve Medicare’s problems is taking a narrow view, to say the least.
Just Some Fuckhead
Well, no.
The bomb manufacturer makes money on the bomb which goes back into the economy. The personnel that are paid to warehouse, maintain and deploy the bomb are paid wages that trickle back into the economy. The people that lobby Washington for the bombing are contributing money to the economy, in the form of bribes and soft money. The diplomats and advisors required to mediate an end to the bombing process contribute to the economy. The newspapers and television stations that report on the bombing and mediation are contributing to the economy. The contractors, advisors and engineers required to rebuild the bombing targets are contributing to the economy. The restocking of bombs and stoked resentments from the first bombing starts the process all over again.
Just Some Fuckhead
In short, bombing = US$. Refrigerators = China$
henqiguai
@Comrade DougJ (#21):
On a Dover Publication on introductory topology – Mendelson, Bert Introduction to Topology (Third Edition); ISBN-13: 978-0-486-66352-4.
henqiguai
@burnspbesq (#60):
Really ? I always preferred Lying with Statistics. Always told myself I would either buy Tufte’s book or attend one of his seminars, but never hit the trifecta of time to attend, funds to purchase (or pay for the seminar), and seminar schedule (when it was offered within my commute range).
No one of Importance
@Comrade DougJ:
Sullivan isn’t a sociopath, he’s a sociopath’s enabler. Which is worse in some ways because he can help doing what he does – but doesn’t.
AAA Bonds
^owns
El Cid
It seems to me that a term like “sociopath” applied to Sullivan has the perverse effect of making him seem more serious and important than he in fact is.
Socioputz? Sociopathile? Sociopanderer?
Mo's Bike Shop
This is relevant to my interests.
Villago Delenda Est
@Just Some Fuckhead:
You make a wrench it can be used to do other useful things.
You make a bomb, you drop it, big boom, and you’re done.