The astonishing role of The Stupid: As citizens, we seem to have a very hard time coming to terms with how stupid our political culture now is.
We talk a lot about press corps bias, much less about The Dumb.
How dumb is our high journalistic culture? That culture is astoundingly dumb. From the realm of economics, two quick recent examples:
Last Sunday, Andrew Ross Sorkin wrote a piece for the New York Times about high-end taxation. Some of what he wrote was informative; much of what he wrote was pap. We were most struck by the sheer absurdity of what follows. In this passage, Sorkin explained how hard it can be to get by on a mere quarter million:
SORKIN (5/15/11): The Fiscal Times, a publication financed by Peter G. Peterson, the very public deficit hawk and former commerce secretary under President Richard Nixon, commissioned BDO, an accounting firm, to look at how households that make $250,000 fared in different parts of the country, mostly in middle- to upper-class neighborhoods.
The takeaway, according to the study: ''It's not exactly Easy Street for our $250,000-a-year family, especially when they live in high-tax areas on either coast.''
Even when including in its estimates an additional $3,000 from investment income, the report said, families ''end up in the red—after taxes, saving for retirement and their children's education, and a middle-of-the-road cost of living—in seven out of the eight communities in the analysis.”
According to the Fiscal Times, it’s hard for families earning a quarter million to stay afloat in many locales. The oddness of this finding didn’t seem to occur to Sorkin. Question: If families can’t make it on $250,000, what happens to families with average incomes? Neither Sorkin nor the Fiscal Times seemed to ask themselves that.
(Versions of this Fiscal Times report have been floating around for at least six months. For our original take on this report, see THE DAILY HOWLER 12/21/10.)
Sorkin’s report was strangely clueless—and Sorkin’s a major scrub-faced player in the upper-end press. But then, this front-page report in the Washington Post was a bit clueless too. The report discussed a plan to eliminate tax breaks for major oil companies as part of the effort to reduce federal deficits. Here’s the way it started, front-page headline included:
RUCKER/MONTGOMERY (5/11/11): Senate Democrats push to end tax breaks for big oil companies to cut deficit
Senate Democrats unveiled a plan Tuesday to save $21 billion over the next decade by eliminating tax breaks for the nation's five biggest oil companies, a move designed to counter Republican demands to control the soaring national debt without new taxes.
With the proposal, Democrats sought to reframe the debate over debt reduction to include fresh revenue as well as sharp cuts in spending. For the first time, Democratic leaders suggested an equal split between spending cuts and new taxes—"50-50," said Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.).
That represents a larger share for taxes than has been proposed by either President Obama or the bipartisan commission he appointed to recommend how to cut the national debt.
Democrats hoped to save $21 billion over the next decade, part of their effort to “cut the national debt/cut [the] deficit.” But how big are projected annual deficits over the next ten years? In a lengthy front-page report, Rucker and Montgomery never made any attempt to say.
Without that information, can readers even begin to judge this proposal as an attempt at deficit reduction? Actually, no—they pretty much can’t. This problem didn’t seem to occur to the Post’s front-page editors.
Routinely, it’s stunning to see the role played by The Dumb in our budget discussions. But let’s be honest: Stupid and dumb are the default settings for our national debate in almost all areas. That said, very few people seem to identify The Dumb as a basic problem. In our current political culture, we tend to rail about issues of bias and ideology. But we rarely tell voters a crucial fact: A vast amount of what they read is almost defiantly dumb.
Final example:
This morning, a New York Times editorial discusses the budget dealings of the so-called Gang of Six, which now has five members. Early on, the editors describe Tom Coburn’s recent “nuanced” approach to taxes:
NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL (5/19/11): That's why the decision on Tuesday by Senator Tom Coburn, a Republican of Oklahoma, to leave the ''Gang of Six'' deficit talks before that could happen was so unfortunate. It's not that we regularly agreed with Mr. Coburn's very conservative outlook—far from it. But he recently showed courage by acknowledging that the budget cannot be put in long-term balance without new money. Few other Republicans are willing to admit that truth out loud.
Mr. Coburn adopted a nuanced position that allowed him to say he was against an increase in tax rates. But he was not against eliminating certain breaks and broadening the tax base, which could result in rich people paying more. By current Republican standards, that constitutes a breakthrough, one that negotiators of both parties could combine with measures to reduce the growth of spending—and get closer to a balanced budget.
Naturally, he was pilloried for it. The no-tax-no-how core denounced him, as did right-wing blogs.
Indeed, Coburn’s position on taxes has been extremely “nuanced.” He wasn’t willing to raise tax rates; in fact, he wanted to lower rates. But the editors say he was willing to take certain steps “which could result in rich people paying more.” Did that mean that rich people might pay more taxes on the same amount of income? Or would they only be paying more taxes because they were earning more money? Coburn kept trying to cloud the issue, in part because of GOP pathology regarding tax increases.
That said, we haven’t seen any news org successfully tackle the ins and outs of this basic conceptual matter. Simply put, work like that is beyond the skill level of the mainstream press. In today’s editorial, the editors say that Coburn knew that budget-balancing would require “new money.” That is a thoroughly mumble-mouthed way of discussing these basic concepts.
Our public discussions are quite underwhelming. So are many major journalists. In fact, our culture is being destroyed by The Dumb, but we continue to screech about bias and ideology. Few people ever mention The Dumb as a basic political problem, although The Dumb is a basic player in these perilous times.
You can’t run a modern society on The Dumb. Citizens need to be warned about this fact. Beyond that, citizens need to be challenged about a basic citizen’s duty:
We all have a basic citizen’s duty. Even when it feels very good, we can’t let ourselves and our tribal mates succumb to the joys of The Dumb.
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