Conservative apostate Bruce Bartlett takes to Forbes to argue that the Tea Party movement, largely motivated by opposition to high taxes and out of control federal spending, is actually not particularly informed on these issues.
Tea Partyers were asked how much the federal government gets in taxes as a percentage of the gross domestic product. According to Congressional Budget Office data, acceptable answers would be 6.4%, which is the percentage for federal income taxes; 12.7%, which would be for both income taxes and Social Security payroll taxes; or 14.8%, which would represent all federal taxes as a share of GDP in 2009.
Not everyone follows these numbers closely, and Tea Partyers may have been thinking of figures from a few years ago, before the recession when taxes were higher. According to the CBO, the highest figure for all federal taxes since 1970 came in the year 2000, when they reached 20.6% of GDP. As we know, after that George W. Bush and Republicans in Congress cut federal taxes; they fell to 18.5% of GDP in 2007, before the recession hit, and 17.5% in 2008.
Tuesday’s Tea Party crowd, however, thought that federal taxes were almost three times as high as they actually are. The average response was 42% of GDP and the median 40%. The highest figure recorded in all of American history was half those figures: 20.9% at the peak of World War II in 1944.
This is actually a ridiculously unfair question. Nobody thinks of taxes in terms of GDP; it’s a meaningless number to most of us.
To follow up, Tea Partyers were asked how much they think a typical family making $50,000 per year pays in federal income taxes. The average response was $12,710, the median $10,000. In percentage terms this means a tax burden of between 20% and 25% of income.
Of course, it’s hard to know what any particular individual or family pays in taxes, but according to IRS tax tables, a single person with $50,000 in taxable income last year would owe $8,694 in federal income taxes, and a married couple filing jointly would owe $6,669.
But these numbers are high because to have a taxable income of $50,000, one’s gross income would be higher by at least the personal exemption, which is $3,650, and the standard deduction, which is $5,700 for single people and $11,400 for married couples. Owning a home or having children would reduce one’s tax burden further.
According to calculations by the Joint Committee on Taxation, a congressional committee, tax filers with adjusted gross incomes between $40,000 and $50,000 have an average federal income tax burden of just 1.7%. Those with adjusted gross incomes between $50,000 and $75,000 have an average burden of 4.2%.
This is a more fair question but only by comparison. At $50,000 income, the marginal tax rate is 25%. That makes the average guess of $12,710 almost exactly right. Bartlett is right, of course, that few people actually pay the full marginal rate because of various deductions and credits. But, again, people tend to think of these things based on the published rates and the amount withheld from their paychecks. And, of course, they also think of FICA, Medicare, and other federal withholdings as part of their federal tax burden.
Tea Partyers also seem to have a very distorted view of the direction of federal taxes. They were asked whether they are higher, lower or the same as when Barack Obama was inaugurated last year. More than two-thirds thought that taxes are higher today, and only 4% thought they were lower; the rest said they are the same.
As noted earlier, federal taxes are very considerably lower by every measure since Obama became president. And given the economic circumstances, it’s hard to imagine that a tax increase would have been enacted last year. In fact, 40% of Obama’s stimulus package involved tax cuts. These include the Making Work Pay Credit, which reduces federal taxes for all taxpayers with incomes below $75,000 by between $400 and $800.
The problem with this is that people are likely confused on this matter because they quite reasonably believe that the effect of Obama policy proposals, most notably health care reform and the massive debt incurred for the stimulus package, will mean higher taxes. (Bartlett acknowledges this later in the piece, calling it “Ricardian Equivalence.”) People tend to conflate things that the president proposes with actual reality.
Probably the simplest motivation the Tea Partyers have is the one that Howard Beale (actor Peter Finch) gave in the 1976 movie Network. “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take it any more!” he said to cheering crowds. In other words, tea parties just represent unfocused anger at current economic conditions. Those who feel this way have latched on to the Tea Party movement not because they really believe that their taxes are too high, that taxes are rising or that taxes are at the root of our economic problem. Rather, they have joined because it’s the only game in town; the only organized force with at least the potential of bringing about change that might make things better.
In this sense, the tea parties are simply the latest manifestation of populism, which has arisen periodically throughout American history. In the 19th century populist anger was based in rural America and directed at the banks and railroads as well as government. Populists thought that free coinage of silver, an inflationary policy that would have raised prices for farm commodities, was the solution to their problems in the same way that today’s Tea Party crowd thinks that the Federal Reserve, bailouts to big businesses and a looming government takeover of the health industry are at the root of our economic malaise. Tax cuts are like free silver–a one-size-fits-all policy response.
Here, Bartlett is almost surely right. Large swaths of the public at large, and most of the Tea Partiers, are scared about their economic future and distrustful of government. Some of their fears are rational; others, not so much.
But it’s unfair to single out the Tea Party movement for ridicule. Those of us who follow public policy very closely have a better idea of economic statistics than average citizens but even most of us only have ballpark estimates of some of the figures that were surveyed here. It’s just unfair to expect otherwise.
To the extent that large numbers of citizens are angry at their government because they’re grossly uninformed, the blame lies with their leaders, not them. It’s the job of the president and elected representatives to persuade the citizens that their proposed policies are beneficial. If they’re failing to do that, they’re not doing their jobs.
First: scotty – the latest attempt at health care reform is presented as the trojan beaver. (everybody wants it, but the thought of who else has had their hand in it is kind of frightening – rodney)
Second:Dodd – Earl decided that, in the future, he needs to be somewhat more specific about his birthday requests.
Third: Maggie Mama – TMZ has just learned that there will be a Michelle Obama balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade this year.
HONORABLE MENTION
yetanotherjohn – The problem started when she tried to shave the beaver.
Washington Post writer Spencer Hsu reports that senators Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) have had ghostwritten for them written an op-ed in the Washington Post that provides an outline of the immigration reform bill they plan to introduce in the coming weeks; the plan’s “four pillars” are:
requiring biometric Social Security cards to ensure that illegal workers cannot get jobs; fulfilling and strengthening our commitments on border security and interior enforcement; creating a process for admitting temporary workers; and implementing a tough but fair path to legalization for those already here.
Reinforcing the Border Fence
There isn’t anything terribly original here; Hsu points out that most of these elements were part of the failed comprehensive proposals under the Bush administration as well, which were eventually abandoned in favor of stricter enforcement of current immigration laws and building both a virtual (and bug-ridden) and real fence along the border; while perhaps rhetorically appealing to some on both sides of the aisle, neither solution was likely to have any real effect on the informal economy or most of the millions of illegal aliens already in the United States.
But in the run-up to a midterm election where many Democrats in marginal seats are already running scared of Obamacare and likely facing Tea Party-energized Republicans and independents, scaring up enough votes for the Schumer-Graham plan in both chambers of Congress will be a serious challenge.
With a biometric social security card that looks suspiciously like a mandatory national ID card (at the moment, the social security card is an optional form of ID for people who can prove the right to work with a citizenship document), a “path to legalization” that strongly resembles the paths in the past that were spun by opponents as “amnesty,” and a guest worker system that working-class union members and non-union employees alike probably fear will amount to “foreigners stealing American jobs,” the bill’s chances of passage in any form, particularly before November, seem very slim.
Just in time for St. Patrick’s day, CNN explores the myths and realities of hangover remedies.
A hangover is really the symptoms of acute withdrawal, in which your body reacts to not having a drug in its system anymore, said Krista Medina, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Cincinnati.
Contrary to popular belief, drinking more while hung over is not going to make you feel better, doctors say. In fact, the other home remedies you may turn to, such as greasy food, probably won’t work, either.
Part of the reason there’s no good hangover remedy is that, although the phenomenon has probably been around since humans discovered alcohol, there’s no single scientifically proven reason for a hangover, although there are correlations with the various symptoms of the “Irish flu.” “There probably won’t be a known effective treatment until we understand the physiology better,” said Dr. Sharon Horesh Bergquist, assistant professor in the department of medicine at Emory University.
What is a hangover?
One theory blames chemicals in some alcoholic drinks called congeners, said Dr. Samir Zakhari, director of the division of metabolism and health effects at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. These congeners, which could be toxic, contribute to alcohol’s unique taste, but they can also interfere with cell function and leave some lasting physical marks. A 2009 study from Brown University found that the darker the liquor, the more congeners it has, which could exacerbate headaches and other hangover symptoms.
A different theory contends that drinking causes dehydration because alcohol increases urine output. Alcohol inhibits the release of an antidiuretic hormone, meaning the kidneys don’t conserve water as well, and you urinate more, Bergquist said.
[...]
[E]ating greasy foods after a night of drinking probably won’t make you feel better, Zakhari said. “If a person wants to eat, that’s fine,” he said. “They should do that during drinking or before drinking, not after. Because if people eat after drinking, it might be too late.” By the time you have a hangover, eating greasy fare won’t have much of an effect in alleviating the symptoms, he said. Bland foods, on the other hand, elevate your blood sugar and settle your stomach, according to the Mayo Clinic. Stick to toast and crackers.
[...]
This belief that drinking more alcohol will alleviate the symptoms of too much drinking “doesn’t make sense,” Zakhari said. “You already probably have done enough damage to the different parts of the body like the liver and heart,” he said. “You don’t want to go back and put more alcohol on top of that.”
[...]
Small studies have shown that, if taken in very large amounts, vitamin B6 may reduce the symptoms of a hangover, Bergquist said. Still, this research did not include many participants and is not definitive. “There are anecdotes about these things without any evidence,” said Dr. James C. Garbutt, a professor of psychiatry in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine, who specializes in alcoholism treatment and research. “Medical science doesn’t spend a lot of time treating hangovers. We want to try to prevent them.”
Other supposed remedies include activated charcoal, which is supposed to absorb alcohol from the stomach but actually wouldn’t work because the hangover occurs hours after drinking, Swift said. “The most outlandish thing is that people who feel badly obviously want to feel better, so they’re willing to try untested remedies,” he said.
There, however, are some natural remedies that some doctors think merit further research, including prickly pear cactus extract and yeast-based preparations, according to the Mayo Clinic. Some also believe that the borage plant yields a supplement that may help with headache, laziness and tiredness.
Doctors do agree that water will help somewhat with hangover symptoms because, as noted above, dehydration is often a symptom.
Zakhari also recommends getting rest. Medina noted that ibuprofen may help with headaches, and caffeine may help boost energy, but no treatments get at the underlying condition of hangover; they only ease symptoms, she said.
My practice has been to avoid getting hangovers in the first place, through a combination of moderating alcohol intake, increasing intake of non-alcoholic fluids, and mixing drinking with eating. In the rare instances where I’ve miscalculated on this score, I do find that a combination of drinking large quantities of electrolyte replacement beverages (sports drinks such as Gatorade) and caffeine help speed recovery.
The piece also mentions the Bloody Mary, easily the most popular hangover “cure.” What it doesn’t say is that, while consuming vodka while hung over is likely a bad idea, the tomato juice and capsaicin-rich pepper sauce are both good for you. The more healthful concoction — a “virgin” Bloody Mary — is jokingly known as a “Bloody Shame” but nonetheless the wiser choice if you’ve overindulged.
Thom Shanker reports on a minor bureaucratic move at DoD:
An executive order published without fanfare this month does away with a system for Pentagon succession instituted by former President George W. Bush, which played down the service secretaries and elevated positions held at the time by trusted aides to Donald H. Rumsfeld, who as defense secretary wanted it that way.
These plans governing Pentagon succession are intended to guarantee civilian control of the military during a doomsday situation, like a nuclear strike or a terrorist attack, when the defense secretary could be taken out of action at the moment when war-fighting decisions must be made. The Bush order, issued in December 2005, continued the traditional sequence of the deputy defense secretary as next in line. But it booted the Army secretary out of the No. 3 slot in the order of succession, in favor of the under secretary of defense for intelligence.
[...]
President Obama’s executive order, published March 1, re-establishes the Army to its former place.
If the defense secretary, his deputy and the Army secretary were all hors de combat, authority would then pass to the Navy secretary, then to the Air Force secretary, in the historic order of establishment of the services. Next in line after them would be the under secretary for acquisition, technology and logistics; the under secretary for policy; the comptroller, who is the Pentagon’s chief budget officer; and the under secretary for personnel and readiness. Only after all of them would the line lead to the Pentagon’s senior intelligence official.
White House and Defense Department officials said the new executive order was intended to restore Pentagon succession to its traditional pattern and to render a sequence based on the office, not on the personality in that position at any given time. (The succession plan would also take effect should the defense secretary become incapacitated by health problems, but that could be handled in a calm, deliberate manner across the government.)
John Cole observes that the Bush team “basically changed the protocol in order to make sure cronies were in charge no matter what happened. Every time you can’t think you will be surprised by these guys, they go out and one-up themselves.”
It’s true that Rumsfeld preferred to have Stephen Cambone, with whom he had a long relationship, be senior to the Service secretaries, with whom he had no such trust. But so what? These people were all political appointees. If the administration wants to put “cronies” in the line of succession, reshuffling the succession just means they need to ensure a “crony” is the Secretary of the Army.
Second, the problem with Paul Wolfowitz, Cambone, and others in the Rumsfeld posse wasn’t that they were cronies or loyalists. There wasn’t a Michael “Brownie” Brown among them: They were all extraordinarily bright, credentialed, and experienced. The problem was one of groupthink: They all shared a vision of America’s role in the world and the best means of using the instruments of power to achieve it. That’s great for continuity but not so great for vetting policy decisions.
Beyond that, the explanation given at the time for the Bush succession strikes me as eminently plausible: It makes sense to have folks working on DoD-wide issues on a daily basis take over if one’s goal is continuity. The Service secretaries are there to fight for the needs of the Army, Navy, and Air Force and spend their days dealing with narrower issues.
I was a bit startled to see the headline “If bin Laden is found, he’ll be killed, Holder says” appearing at the Washington Post (via Memeorandum). It appears to be sensationalistic, however:
Osama bin Laden “will never appear in an American courtroom,” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. told House members at a hearing Tuesday. “Let’s deal with the reality here,” Holder said in response to questions from Rep. John Culberson (R-Tex.). “The reality is, we will be reading Miranda rights to a corpse.”
Members of an Appropriations subcommittee pressed Holder about the Justice Department’s response to the failed Christmas Day bombing plot and the abortive decision to try in Lower Manhattan the alleged masterminds of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
He grew most heated, however, amid GOP attacks over the hypothetical capture of bin Laden. No law enforcement response would be necessary, he said, because “he will be killed by us or by his own people.”
It seems to me that Holder is merely making a prediction, not stating the public policy of the Obama administration. That is, we presume that Osama would rather be a martyr than be taken prisoner. Further, we presume that Osama’s cronies have the same preference.
Conversely, while I’m sure the members of the special forces or intelligence team with the opportunity to shoot or capture Osama would very much enjoy pulling the trigger, that they’d much rather have the intelligence and propaganda value of dragging the Big Cheese in.
UPDATE (Dave Schuler): I have corrected a typographical error in the final sentence.
UPDATE (James Joyner): Oops. I actually made the Obama/Osama typo twice in the post and caught the first instance. Nothing nefarious intended: While I typed “Osama” very frequently in the early years of the blog, I now type “Obama” several times and day, so my brain’s just rewired to do it automatically.
An otherwise very good piece by CSM’s Christa Case Bryant detailing Lindsey Vonn’s impressive third straight World Cup victory drifts into one of my pet peeves:
This is Vonn’s third straight overall title, a feat unmatched since Austria’s Petra Kronberger won her trio from 1990-92. Vonn’s 11 World Cup wins this season make her second only to Austria’s Annemarie Moser-Proell, who won 14 in 1988-89 and 62 in her career. While Vonn is only at 33 so far, that’s a new US record, beating out five-time Olympic medalist Bode Miller of Franconia, N.H.
Vonn is a terrific skier and her accomplishments deserve celebrating. But her career is in no way comparable to that of Bode Miller or any other male skier. As a wise man once said on an only tangentially related matter, they’re not in the same league — they’re not even the same sport.
We have no way of knowing, save conjecture, how Vonn would do in competition against men. But, presumably, there’s a reason that downhill skiing is, like most other sports, gender segregated.
The same is true of coaching. For example, Tennessee women’s basketball coach Pat Summit’s career has been quite impressive. But taking it to the next step — comparing it to John Wooden’s or Bob Knight’s or Dean Smith’s — is silly. Summit may or may not have been wildly successful coaching the men’s game. But she hasn’t done it. And the women’s game, where two schools have dominated since time immemorial, simply isn’t comparable to the men’s game.
Via Margaret Soltan, I see that UT San Antonio is starting up a football team and that the faculty are predictably concerned about the potential drain on resources.
Next fall, UTSA will spend millions to field a football team it hopes will someday compete with cross-state rivals like the University of Texas, Texas Tech and Texas A&M. But the plan goes far beyond athletics. As the college makes a push to become one of the next tier-one research universities in Texas, campus leaders say the school’s academic and athletic goals are closely linked.
Students and administrators, led by UTSA President Ricardo Romo, hope the team will foster school pride and capture the attention of alumni, who they believe will be more likely to support university financially. They also hope a team will transform the university from a commuter school to one where students live and play. “The whole campus is kind of buzzing about it,” says Travis Goodrich, a UTSA sophomore. “We need school spirit. We don’t really have that right now.”
But there are skeptics. While many faculty have enthusiastically supported the creation of the football program, others have wondered whether the university has its priorities straight. Mansour El-Kikhia, president of UTSA’s faculty senate, says faculty support is mixed for the project. The major fear, he says, is that the team will distract from the university’s academic mission or divert dollars from the institutional budget. The university has pledged “that no funds will be taken away from the institution to finance this football team,” El-Kikhia says. “Of course, there’s always the fear that UTSA will become a diploma mill for athletes and so forth.”
[...]
Steven Kellman, a professor of English at UTSA, said he would rather have had the school’s most generous alumni contribute to academics, not a football team. He worries that if the team isn’t profitable quickly, the school will be footing the bill. A 2009 NCAA study found that only 18 athletic programs reported positive revenue for all five years surveyed. “I can’t imagine that a new program just getting off the ground would have positive revenue, even with outside donations,” Kellman says. “UTSA is a young institution that cannot count on a large corps of alumni, particularly wealthy alumni.”
Romo says the boosters who donate to football are not necessarily the same people who would donate to academic programs. But Dennis Coates, an economist at the University of Maryland and a contributor to the Sports Economicst blog, says the concern that football is siphoning off potential donations for academic purposes is a frequent source of conflict at schools with teams. And he says that even many of the most successful programs struggle to turn a profit. “In many institutions the athletic departments get subsidized by the rest of the university — not the other way around, as the idea of football as a profit center for the university suggests,” he says.
The last point is clever obfuscation: Football is certainly profitable at many, many schools. But that money’s typically funneled back into the overall athletic program where it has to fund a myriad of money-losing programs. Like, for example, all the women’s teams except perhaps basketball at two or three schools.
Otherwise, though, I’m sympathetic to the faculty position, having been at Troy State (now Troy) when it was making the move from Division I-AA to Division I-A. On paper, it was the dumbest possible idea. Alabama has 4.3 million people and already had two entrenched football powerhouses in Alabama and Auburn and a third school, UAB, making the move. And Troy had 5000ish students on campus and 20,000ish people in all of Pike County, yet I-A required guaranteeing something like 25,000 paid attendees at every home game.
And, yet, it seems by all accounts to have been a good move. The school’s profile has undeniably been raised, which makes it more likely that alumni will donate money for buildings, academic programs, and the like.
Like it or not — and I generally don’t — college sports is the main thing that makes alumni enthusiastic about their school.
I’m not sure I quite understand this, given that cost is so important as a burden to taxpayers when it comes to health care. If Democrats want so badly to abort babies because of it, why are we bothering with someone who has a broken neck and back at 69? It sounds to me like she’s pretty well used up and has probably been living off the taxpayers for plenty of years to begin with. Aren’t we at least going to get a vote on it?
Come on, Harry – do your civic duty. The nation’s broke and counting on you guy. Pull the plug and get back to work. And don’t bill us for a full day today, either. This is no time to be sloughing off. Air freight her home, you can bury her during recess on your own time and dime. Or are you going to bill us for that, too?
Now, aside from it being poor form to try to score cheap political points off the suffering of politicians’ families — Lara Reid isn’t the Senate Majority leader — the argument doesn’t even make sense on its face. While I oppose the current health care reform plan, Reid and company are trying to extend care, not limit it. For that matter, while I’m passionately against abortion in all but the most extreme cases, who’s arguing that it should be performed more often so that we can save money? Certainly, not any Democrats I know.
Ah: Dan links to another post, titled “Stupak: Dem Leadership Wants More Children Aborted To Cut Costs.” The substance:
What are Democratic leaders saying?“If you pass the Stupak amendment, more children will be born, and therefore it will cost us millions more. That’s one of the arguments I’ve been hearing,”Stupak says. “Money is their hang-up. Is this how we now value life in America? If money is the issue — come on, we can find room in the budget. This is life we’re talking about.”
I don’t know Bart Stupak well enough to dismiss this as a damnable lie. So, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt that maybe someone who is technically a “Democratic leader” said something remotely like that. Or that he honestly misunderstood someone as saying that. Regardless, it’s a ridiculous distraction from the real debate: It’s not a significant reason why Democrats support either health care reform or abortion.
In an update, Dan links to a post by Rob Port titled, “Rep. Stupak: Pro-Choice Democrats Say Abortion Funding Needed To Keep Too Many Kids From Being Born” which in turn links to an older post titled “Pelosi: Free Condoms And Food Stamps Better For Economy Than Tax Cuts.”
STEPHANOPOULOS: Hundreds of millions of dollars to expand family-planning services. How is that stimulus?
PELOSI: Well, the family-planning services reduce cost. They reduce cost. The states are in terrible fiscal budget crises now, and part of what we do for children’s health, education and some of those elements are to help the states meet their financial needs. One of those—one of the initiatives you mentioned, the contraception, will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government.
Condoms reduce births and so do abortions. So, since Pelosi supports giving out free condoms to reduce births, she obviously wants to encourage more abortions! To save money! QED.
Surely, we can argue against the Democrats based on their actual policy goals and/or the implications of their actual policy proposals?
In addition to uncertain healthcare services, economic disadvantages, and finding a place to call home, veterans certainly do not need any more challenges. Unfortunately, the wounds of war can be less obvious than those that we can see. Psychological disorders and sicknesses caused by toxic exposure can be the most damaging aspects of war that veterans bring home. Toxin exposure in particular is of particular concern as previous exposure to asbestos among veterans is causing incidence of the aggressive cancer mesothelioma to rise among former members of the armed services. We must not leave those who risked their lives for our nation in the cold. Our veterans have never questioned the right or wrong of war when it mattered most. They simply did as they were trained. We must now show the same unwavering determination, in all ways we are able, by affording those opportunities to which they are entitled, including financial, medical and emotional support to all veterans.
