Archive for April 2, 2009

An Ode to Humor: The House Republican Budget Alternative

Was it last week’s media storm by Republicans unveiling their budget preview, providing a blitzkrieg of circles and lines in the absence of numbers? Was it Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) selection of April Fool’s Day to debut the Republican budget he and his staff assembled?

What made me nod appreciatively, thinking “Ahhhh, now that was amusing.”?

Actually, it was Ryan’s decision to seriously consider 50- and 70-year economic projections in the House Republican Budget Alternative. Economic projections are notoriously tricky. Assumptions have to be specifically and carefully detailed, and even under the best conditions, forecasts are often inaccurate. The value of a forecast often boils down to the relative tolerance one is willing to afford to inaccuracy. Of course, shorter forecasts, soundly constructed, have a better shot at not wildly missing the mark. Assumptions have a hard time surviving reality because, well, sh*t happens. World — and personal — events are not rigidly set. Using a 70-year projection in an effort to spur substantive discussion of fiscal plans is like me asking my toddler son to sit down with a crayon and map out his entire life so that we might debate pros and cons of his decisions RIGHT NOW.

Is this not common sense?

Perhaps it isn’t because I opened Ryan’s budget document this morning, ready to read and learn and, instead, found figures like this:

and this:

and this:

and — finally — this:

There’s a trick to reading academic or policy papers efficiently. Step 1: Check out the table of contents, including the lists of figures and tables, if available. If not, read the section titles throughout the paper. Step 2: Read the introduction and conclusion. Step 3: Cruise the aforementioned figures and tables, which should illustrate or support points raised in the intro/conclusion. Step 4: Return to introduction and begin reading text.

I completed steps 1 & 2, but it was step 3 that stumped me. At first I laughed because I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, but then I realized how brazilliant using such long projections is as a strategy. The happy, flat, stable, green line of promised Republican fiscal responsibility is so reassuring next to the evil, jagged, ever-rising red line of threatened Democratic wastefulness.

Nevermind the fact that the projections are worthless. Ryan has cobbled together details from his alternative budget with long-term CBO projections published in December 2007 as part of a specific paper detailing the need for reform to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Interestingly, that CBO paper was prepared by Peter Orszag, who then was CBO’s director and who, now, as director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, is responsible for Obama’s budget, the one Ryan’s report seeks to skewer.

I cannot say, even for the sake of argument, that Ryan’s use of the CBO’s long-term projections is appropriate since he, too, is interested in entitlement reform. Ryan’s use of the CBO data lacks context. Similarly, Ryan does not spend much effort defining his own economic assumptions. He simply tacks on the CBO’s recent preliminary analysis of Obama’s budget to previous long-term projections to show crazed overspending for the next century and then subtracts the savings Republican fiscal acumen would shower upon the nation from these same projections to get that pretty green line.

AAARRRGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!! More after the jump.

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Blood & Iron: the Jarring Conservative Adjustment to Disempowerment

Has it always been this way? The far-right happily occupied the White House for eight years – six with no political opposition, and four with no official opposition from any constitutional branch of government – and, by all accounts, used its time wisely, setting new standards for divisiveness and shrill partisanship, all masked in a cloak of “patriotism” and “respect for the presidency.” Through all of this, we on the left certainly had our fair share of outrage. But the far-right seems to have matched and surpassed in seventy-odd days what it took us at least four years to build.

Take RedState (please!), where, if you can get past the irrelevant screeching about conspiracy theories, stories titled “At What Point Do People Revolt?”, quoting the bloodier parts of Jefferson and steeped in secession-style rhetoric, appear to be the norm:

If the GOP plays its cards right, it will have a winning issue in 2010. But it is going to have to get back to “leave me the hell alone” style federalism where the national government recedes and the people themselves will have to fight to take their states back from special interests out of touch with body politic as a whole.

Were I in Washington State, I’d be cleaning my gun right about now waiting to protect my property from the coming riots or the government apparatchiks coming to enforce nonsensical legislation.

That last bit – I kid you not – was over dishwater detergent.

From this rhetoric, bizarrely violent but increasingly common, to the ever-entertaining antics of Glenn Beck, the conservative Pagliacci, one begins to picture what remains of American conservatism as a petulant six year old, capable of a prickly normalcy while cautiously placated, but prone to erratic, irrational tantrums upon the slightest provocation. Under Bush, it was every American’s patriotic duty to unflinchingly support the President; under Obama, apparently, it’s every American’s patriotic duty to clean their guns and draw up plans to surround “them.” Maybe it’s just me, but the right’s unbalanced behavior while out of power is quickly becoming the best reason to make sure they stay there. That and the ineptitude.