Who will challenge us the people: Paul Krugman’s new column starts with a deeply important fact. Krugman moves on to other points, but let’s stop to consider this:
KRUGMAN (5/2/11): Last year the G.O.P. pulled off two spectacular examples of bait-and-switch campaigning. Medicare, where the same people who screamed about death panels are now trying to dismantle the whole program, was the most obvious. But the same thing happened with regard to financial reform.As you may recall, Republicans ran hard against bank bailouts. Among other things, they managed to convince a plurality of voters that the deeply unpopular bailout legislation proposed and passed by the Bush administration was enacted on President Obama’s watch.
People don’t know who enacted the bailouts. Krugman doesn’t cite a particular survey or poll, but here’s a Pew survey from last July in which this problem was recorded.
For the record, there was no partisan difference in Pew’s responses. Democrats as well as Republicans tended to think that Obama, not Bush, had enacted the TARP bank bailouts.
Krugman went on to make other points. But the ignorance of we the people was also featured in a report in yesterday’s Washington Post. What does the federal budget go? John Norris did the reporting:
NORRIS (5/1/11): In poll after poll, Americans overwhelmingly say they believe that foreign aid makes up a larger portion of the federal budget than defense spending, Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, or spending on roads and other infrastructure. In a November World Public Opinion poll, the average American believed that a whopping 25 percent of the federal budget goes to foreign aid. The average respondent also thought that the appropriate level of foreign aid would be about 10 percent of the budget—10 times the current level.Compared with our military and entitlement budgets, this is loose change. Since the 1970s, aid spending has hovered around 1 percent of the federal budget. International assistance programs were close to 5 percent of the budget under Lyndon B. Johnson during the war in Vietnam, but have dropped since.
We Americans are amazingly clueless. We think that 25 percent of the budget goes to foreign aid. Real answer: One percent.
Sometimes, our ignorance is the result of design. Disinformation campaigns have existed for decades, misleading the public about major issues. And sometimes, individual journalists and/or their editors seem to make a point of keeping us barefoot and clueless. In yesterday’s Washington Post, a news report by Amy Goldstein seemed like a case in point.
Goldstein wrote a rather tortured piece, arguing that Paul Ryan’s Medicare plan has roots in both major parties. Her general work seemed tortured enough, but eventually Goldstein and/or her editor simply refused to let Post readers know a basic fact. How much would Medicare recipients have to pay under the proposed Ryan plan? No one can say with certainty, but a basic fact was quite strangely withheld:
GOLDSTEIN (5/1/11): Eliminating Medicare as it was originally conceived is a major, controversial difference from earlier proposals. James Capretta, a conservative budget expert on health care whom Ryan consulted, said that fee-for-service Medicare “is a big part of why we have fragmentation and inefficiency in health care.” But Rivlin says it is important to preserve the original program as the default alternative.Another difference involves the subsidies. [In their 1999 proposal,] Breaux and Thomas had wanted them to keep up with the price of insurance premiums, with the government typically paying 88 percent. Ryan would adjust subsidies based on consumer prices, which rise more slowly than health-care prices. He has not described the portion of premiums the government would pay but contends that the arrangement would slow the growth of insurance prices.Rivlin, Aaron and the Congressional Budget Office predict that older Americans would end up paying for ever more of their care. “Unless history turns on its head, there is no way” medical costs will slow to the pace of consumer prices, said Stuart Altman, a Brandeis University health economist who was on the 1999 Medicare commission. Back then, he voted against the panel’s proposal, in part because of “ambiguity” over how much the government would pay.
The hackwork there is astounding. According to Goldstein, earlier proponents of Medicare change wanted the government to pay 88 percent of costs. According to Goldstein, Ryan hasn’t said what portion the government would pay under his proposal. Goldstein notes that the CBO has said that older Americans would end up paying more. But she fails to give a number.
Sad. The CBO has estimated that the government will be paying just 32 percent by the year 2030, as opposed to that 88 percent. It’s stunning to think that this jarring number was withheld from this lengthy report. (In Sunday’s Post, Glenn Kessler cited that CBO number in a “fact-checker” piece. So does Robert Pear in today’s New York Times.)
Whatever the reason, we the people are often amazingly clueless. But journalists and politicians tend to skip past that fact. No one likes to tell us we’re clueless. Our cluelessness is one of the most important aspects of modern American politics. But it is rarely discussed.
It’s a citizen’s duty to be well informed; it’s a journalist’s duty to tell us that we’re not. It is also a journalist’s duty to tell us who is misinforming us. In the last few weeks, Donald Trump gave journalists the chance to perform that basic function.
Trump paraded around for weeks, making a string of bizarre suggestions based on what he “had been hearing” or what “they’ve been saying.” (Another key source for the giant buffoon: “The story is...”)
Journalists should have stopped him right there. But very few “journalists” did. On CNN, Anderson Cooper largely fumbled and flailed his way through two nights’ worth of “special reports.” At the New York Times, the editors didn’t dare say boo through weeks of this ludicrous conduct.
Someone should have told the people: This is how you get played.
Who will challenge us the people about our sacred duty as citizens? Who will tell us we’re being deceived? Who will names the names of deceivers? Very few analysts, liberal or mainstream, seem to have such ideas.
Our cluelessness is hugely important. Who will discuss this key fact?
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