Lies, and Damned Lies, and Statistics

From a January 27 editorial in the Wall Street Journal:

“Eighteen months after the recession formally ended, the federal deficit for fiscal 2011 (through September) is expected to increase once again, this time to $1.48 trillion, or 9.8% of GDP. That's a share of GDP topped since World War II only by the 10% reached in Mr. Obama's first year in office, when at least the recession was an excuse. The annual deficit in the 1980s never exceeded 6% of GDP.

As the nearby chart shows, the main culprit is spending. After falling slightly last year due in part to TARP repayments, federal outlays will climb again this year to 24.7% of GDP. Overall federal spending will have increased by $1 trillion in a mere four years. Without spending cuts, outlays will remain above 23% for the rest of the decade—starting to rise again once ObamaCare becomes fully phased in. (The outlay average from 1971 to 2010 was 20.8% of GDP.)”

There are so many objectionable comments in this piece that it is hard to know where to start. So I decided to focus on what has become received wisdom on the Right these days, and, because of the feckless acceptance by the Democrats of a Republican narrative, is generally understood to be true.

It is encapsulated in these sentences from the editorial:

"After falling slightly last year due in part to TARP repayments, federal outlays will climb again this year to 24.7% of GDP."

and 

"The GOP-Obama tax deal will also keep revenues as a share of GDP below 15% in 2011."

The entire article is built on this comparison, and the accompanying chart. But it's misleading; as a look at the actual numbers would show. Here’s a summary:

GDP in 2011 is expected to be about $15 trillion. Federal Revenues will be about $2.3 trillion, or about 15% of GDP. Federal expenditures are expected to be about $3.6 trillion, or roughly 25% of GDP. So far, so good --precise numbers are surprisingly difficult to come by, at least in a half-hour of basic web-searching--, but this is as the article says, or implies.

By the way, according to the World Almanac for 2001, US federal government expenditures were $1,863,039,000,000 --about half of the projected 2011 level. Doubling in ten years sounds like a lot, but the old "Rule of 72" tells us that this would be an annual growth rate of 7% or so had it been spread evenly across the period. Still, population growth has been roughly 1% per year; so the increase is still substantial.

Federal government spending, as a percentage of GDP, was just under 18% in 2000; it grew slowly (okay, inexorably) for the first several years of the Bush II administration, until it was 19.38% in 2007, In 2009, it was 24.67% of GDP --it grew by more than four percentage points, or nearly 20%, in just one year, from 2008 to 2009 --way more than the ten-year average. 

So what happened to government spending between 2008 and 2009, to account for that enormous growth?

Well, spending grew, all right: from 2.75 trillion in 2008 to 3.2 trillion in 2009. This is nothing to sneeze at; it's an increase of 16%. But GDP fell between those 2 years, by 2.5%. This made the growth more than a full percentage point higher than it otherwise would have been: had GDP merely stayed the same, spending as a percent of GDP would have grown by almost exactly 24% --still high; and if GDP had grown by even 2% (less than its average growth during the Bush II years), spending as a percent of GDP would have grown to 23.2%. Of course, if GDP had not fallen, we wouldn't have had a recession, and substantial amounts of the spending growth would not have occurred.

Revenues, meanwhile, went from 2.5 trillion in 2008 to an estimated 2.1 trillion in 2009. Correct: a drop of 400 billion dollars, over 15%. 

So, when the WSJ article says, "As the nearby chart shows, the main culprit is spending," it is simply wrong. Revenues fell by almost the same amount that spending grew.

The fact is, if we step back, we had, between Bush's final full year (2008) and Obama's first (partial) year (2009), an increase in government expenditures of $450 Billion, and a drop in revenues of $417 Billion. So it's not too hard to see why the deficit "under Obama" has ballooned. And most of us, regardless of our opinion of federal spending, would not expect, or want, to see a drop big enough to make up that difference in a single year*.

     *I would be in the minority, here: I'd be happy to see a one-year cut in defense from $700 billion to $200 billion. But then I'm a Muslim-loving socialist.

I admit that when you lay out the actual numbers it's not nearly as sexy as using the percentages. But it would be well to remember that percentages involve both a numerator and a denominator. It's easy to see what happened here; it's what anyone would expect in a huge, crashing recession. 

And as long as we're looking at that WSJ chart of "The Spending Boom," we might just notice that, according to the chart, average revenues and average expenditures, as a percent of GDP, have been, since 1971, 3 percentage points apart. That's exactly what the chart projects for the future. 

Ought Obama to have avoided spending as much as he did? Maybe you can argue that, although not many serious people do --certainly the Republicans in Congress, along with GWB, were happy to install the TARP back in the weeks before Obama was elected. But you cannot seriously argue that Obama has been on some sort of unprecedented, breakneck spending spree.

But you can make it look like that, if your political agenda requires it.

[sources for the figures: http://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com/#usgs302a   and

http://www.measuringworth.com/datasets/usgdp/result.php  ]

Runaway Government Spending

A refrain we have grown used to hearing: Under Obama, federal spending has gotten out of control. Obama himself, because of his spending, has added trillions to the national debt in just 2 years.

Or, as Rep. Paul Ryan (R, WI) put it in his "rebuttal" to the State of the Union speech:

Unfortunately, instead of restoring the fundamentals of economic growth, he engaged in a stimulus spending spree that not only failed to deliver on its promise to create jobs, but also plunged us even deeper into debt.

The facts are clear: Since taking office, President Obama has signed into law spending increases of nearly 25% for domestic government agencies - an 84% increase when you include the failed stimulus. 

Let's ignore the "instead of restoring the fundamentals of economic growth" part, and not point out that the economy has, in fact, grown throughout all of 2010 and even the latter part of 2009 --by the measures Mr Ryan and his Republican cohort value the most, stock prices and corporate profits.

Instead, note how carefully he phrases this: "domestic government agencies." Whazzat mean, exactly? "Obama has signed into law spending increases of nearly 25% for domestic government agencies."

What's a "domestic government agency?"

It depends on what you're talking about. For purposes of various federal privacy rules, "agency" is defined quite broadly. On the other hand, in the government's organization chart, "Agency" is shown as distinct from "Department."

Why is this important? Because we have grown used to weasel words from people who have an ax to grind and want to criticize the government. The truth is, we simply don't know what Ryan was talking about. We don't know if he means that $400 billion was suddenly increased to $500 billion (25%) or $746 billion (84%) counting "the failed stimulus." On the other hand, he could mean that $4 billion was increased to $5 billion (or to $7.46 billion).

But we have a suspicion, don't we? The use of percentages, and the precise and evidently narrow definition his choice of words involves, strongly suggests that (1) actual dollars, instead of percentages, would be a lot less impressive, and (2) using dollars would not have helped the gloss Ryan's rhetoric needs.

In other words, I'm not sure: this may be FOP. It almost certainly isn't Dapper Dan.

Second Amendment Solutions

News Flash: The House of Representatives will not take up the "Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act" on Wednesday as originally scheduled. John Boehner? Squeamish? Perish, or rather Kill, the Thought!

In other news, the "SarahPAC" facebook page has, or perhaps has not, removed the little targets, with rifle-sight crosshairs, on its US map showing twenty congressmen, including Res. Giffords, who need to be "targeted." 

And earlier, KGUN (Really; in America you don't have to resort to fiction for this sort of thing) in Tucson reported that the sheriff of Pima county sort of lit into the radical commentariat who polarize political debate as a way of earning money. "vitriol," he called it. "It may be free speech," he said, "but it's not without consequences."

Meanwhile, a half-dozen people are dead, victims of our political culture, and of a permissive gun mindset that both Rep Giffords and Judge Roll supported in their official capacities.

Hubert Humphrey

I saw a retrospective on the "Happy Warrior" tonight. It brought back a very tumultuous time in our history, particularly when it turned to the events of the (Lyndon) Johnson Administration. Humphrey had been the liberal hero for his entire career, and Johnson's point man in the Senate, without whom the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would never have been passed.

But Johnson's overweening ego, and Humphrey's loyalty to a president whose policy on Viet Nam he could not support but, as Vice-President, could not publicly oppose, doomed Humphrey's candidacy in 1968. I was left, after viewing the carnage of that Chicago summer, and then the fact of Nixon's win, with the thought that Humphrey had adhered to his principles right up to the point where his ambition to be president became powerful enough to silence him, and so in the end, ironically, cost him the presidency.

I switched off the set. "Poor Hubert," I thought. And then, "Poor us."

Sign Up!

"Italian police said Tuesday that letter bombs were sent to three embassies in Rome by Italian anarchists in solidarity with jailed Greek anarchists, who had asked their comrades to organize and coordinate a global "revolutionary war." --from the Associated Press, via USA Today.


So now the anarchists are getting organized. Beg Pardon?


I mean, are they going to form clubs? Political parties? Who's in charge of the anarchist organization? And what are the By-Laws going to look like? In fifty years, will our grandchildren be trooping to the polls to vote for the Anarchist candidate?


Has the world always seemed to get weird, as one gets older? Or am I a special case?


I can't even decide if this is Fop, or something else.

Military Commissions, and Omissions

The morning paper brings news that the government’s initial prosecution under the new and improved military commission process for Guantanamo is not going so well. It seems that the first up is a young man who was “captured” –laying on a battlefield, badly wounded—at the age of fifteen, and subsequently charged with tossing a grenade that killed an American soldier. This was in early 2002. the young man has grown up in the Cuban prison camp. He was threatened, implicitly, with gang rape in an American prison if he did not confess (the interrogator has admitted to this in court), so he confessed. But it seems that certain backward parts of the world look down on such practices as torture, or imprisoning children, or waiting eight years and longer to bring an accused to trial.

The Republicans accused the Obama administration, fifteen minutes after Bush left office, with coddling terrorists because, the military commissions Guantanamo inhabitants were being tried and convicted (the latter being considered a natural concomitant to the former, in Republican-speak). So the Attorney General arranged, with the endorsement of the Mayor of New York, to conduct civilian trials in federal court in Manhattan. The Republicans, though, objected to this as being way too dangerous, like the plan, also scuttled for the same reason, to house the remaining Guantanamo “detainees” in a rural prison in Illinois that is otherwise unoccupied. It’s funny how those who are always crowing about how tough we Yanks are, how “these colors don’t run,” etc., find it too dangerous to house fifteen year-old non-English speakers* in maximum security prisons on American soil.  

*Actually, Omar Khadr, the fifteen year-old in question, being a Canadian, probably speaks English at least as well as G. W. Bush.

So, no trials in the tried and true US court system; it’s back to military tribunals. But the tribunals are stalled because of the “danger to lower Manhattan” controversy that basically shut down the entire process, except for the initial five who had been selected for military trials; and as luck would have it, the case that progressed most expeditiously happened to be that of a fifteen year-old who speaks English and so can be quoted in the press as taking offense at being offered a minimal sentence just so he would agree to a plea deal and spare the government the embarrassment of trying him. He argues that he is not guilty –the nerve of this guy!

And, as a sort of final indignity to the entire sad affair, the Obama administration’s pledge of transparency has been rather damaged in the performance by the Pentagon’s decision to bar from the proceedings two reporters. The reporters were eventually allowed back, but according to the Times they “had to acknowledge in writing to the Defense Department that they understood that they had violated military rules by disclosing the identity of an Army interrogator, even though his name was already publicly known.” So there you have it: it is an offense against the Defense Department’s rules “to disclose information that the military deems “protected,” even if that information has already been disclosed” as reported in the Times.

Why is all this important? Because if the Department of Defense can make its own rules, separate and apart from the US Constitution or other laws, it is a short step to go from that to starting wars on flimsy pretexts, conducting secret operations untroubled by Congressional supervision, conducting military operations, abductions and imprisonment without disclosure of the identity of those imprisoned or even the fact that they have been taken into custody, and similar operations in clandestine fashion within the US as well as elsewhere in the world.  Oh, wait.

The Internet Makes Possible So Much

But it makes one thing impossible, and that is to escape the conclusion that the average American is not only marginally literate, at best; he is unutterably, inalterably, stupid.

Don't agree? Try reading, for an hour, the comments posted to virtually any news item displayed on Yahoo.

They don't call it "yahoo" for nothing.