Under pressure

It’s time for James Fallows, TNC, and every other self-respecting employee of the Atlantic (there are others, right?) to say the words “I am ashamed to work with Megan McArdle.” The truth will set you free.

Her latest idiocy, on why she thinks it’s wrong to say Bush is primarily responsible for the debt problem:

When Obama extends the Bush tax cuts for the rich under pressure from Congressional Republicans, that disappears from his side of the ledger, because after all, he didn’t want to do it. When Bush enacts Medicare Part D under pressure from Congressional Democrats, the full cost is charged against his presidency.

Jon Chait on this:

The notion that Bush passed his prescription drug bill “under pressure from Congressional Democrats” is bizarre. Republicans controlled both houses of Congress at the time, and exerted massive pressure to pass the bill. The coalition that squeezed the bill through after the vote was held open for hours consisted of 207 Republicans and 9 Democrats. Some pressure!

How many fucking factual errors does this moron have to make before she is fired?

I only hope the Chinese have “economics bloggers” of the same quality. That’s our only chance.

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Megan McArdle: Is it her reading that’s the problem? Her comprehension? Her honesty? You Make The Call!

I know that this is all kind of moot in light of the events of the last few days, but someone passed word of this McArdle post to me yesterday, and it seemed to me to capture so much of what has gone wrong in the way the media engaged the debate over deficits and their discontents.

In this particular example of Village media retailing a false narrative, She Who Is Always Wrong™ took issue with a chart referenced by and a conclusion her actually, you know, accomplished colleague* James Fallows has been arguing for a while.

And yes, I know, a cage match between Fallows and McArdle is kind of like watching Ali (in his prime) against the Weehauken Regional Golden Gloves champion, at least as far as intellect and journalistic chops are concerned.  McArdle would win, no doubt, were the judges scoring condescension and high-school in-group wit.  But when it comes to actually reporting an issue, understanding what one has been told, and reporting both facts and (clearly demarcated) analysis/opinion, Fallows v. McArdle wouldn’t be licensed even in Nevada.

But that doesn’t stop the divine Ms. MM, unsurprisingly.  Her role is not to be responsible, or accurate, or even coherent.  It is to advance the approved Central Committee line—which, McArdle, loyal and very effective apparatchik that she is, seems to know before the word from on high need ever get spoken out loud.

Hence her attempt to deflect the hideously liberally biased facts of the history of the deficit.

For, you see, the Fallows post she seeks to undermine focused on this chart:

Fallows made the point, also raised by such raving loony left organizations as the Pew Charitable Trusts and the ever-liberal New York Times that such recourses to history and actual data suggest both a problem and solutions that are different from those we’ve just gone through the wringer trying to debate. (Both references supplied by the White House.)

The broad point is both obvious and obviously too painful for McArdle to contemplate:  George Bush the Lesser inherited significant surpluses and a budget that promised to generate further surpluses through times of economic growth, and transformed that extraordinary fiscal idyll into a crater, a truly spectacular failure of financial prudence.

As the chart above accurately depicts, the largest driver of the deficit is the Bush tax cuts that coincided with the eight years of desperately unspectacular economic returns, culminating in the catastrophic failure of global financial capitalism.** The next largest creator of new debt was expanding domestic spending, followed closely by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, both wars of choice.  The prescription drug benefit (Medicare Part D) is a smaller item on this list—just 10% of the scale of the tax cuts—but it’s worth noting for the argument to come below.

All this, of course, shows what we already knew:  Bush policies, supported overwhelmingly by a GOP party that controlled the House for six of the eight years of the Lesser’s adminstration, and the Senate for more than four of those years, are what produced something approaching half of the total still-outstanding debt accumulated to date by all administrations since the birth of the Republic.  This, the Obama administration contrasts with its own record of a 1.4 trillion dollar addition to what we owe now, composed mostly of the stimulus, some particular policy choices, and a bit (and the significance of this will become obvious in a moment) of the extension of Bush tax policies.

So, given that none of these claims are controversial to anyone but McArdle, why is The Atlantic’s Business and Economics Editor so unhappy with her colleague? More »

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How do you like your blue-eyed boy now?

That brave, wonkish champion of fiscal restraint hasn’t covered himself in glory during the debt-ceiling debate:

Ryan has carefully nurtured his deficit hawk image by expressing his Randian ideology in the high-minded language of the establishment. His favorite attacks on President Obama have revolved around failure to lead and a refusal to openly embrace the fiscal commission report (a report Ryan voted against, but never mind). Now, the work of that fiscal commission has passed into the hands of the Gang of Six, which has commanded strong Senate support and might have a chance in the House if its deficit-cutting recommendations were embraced by a figure with the right-wing fiscal credentials of Ryan. Instead Ryan “dropped what one Republican Senate adviser called a ‘bomb’ on the Gang of Six,” snuffing out any chance of success.

And it’s not just the mere fact of Ryan’s opposition that’s telling, it’s the basis of it. Ryan’s budget plan always relied upon a strategy of obscuring his priorities—Ryan wants to cut entitlement spending in order to preserve low tax rates on the rich, while the public overwhelmingly prefers the exact opposite. And so he has carefully obscured his choices. Does Ryan’s plan cut taxes for the rich? No, no, he says—he simply “reforms” the tax code, just like the fiscal commission does:

[....]

So here comes the Gang of Six with a plan that does everything Ryan proclaims to love. It reduces tax rates. It removes loopholes.

I don’t expect this will make much of an impact on the fanbois, but it’s clear now, Ryan doesn’t give a fuck about anything except lower taxes on the rich. He never even put that much lipstick on the pig to begin with, but it was enough to win the hearts of the Village, and once smitten, they’ll never fall out of love.

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Why Yes. It’s Still True. Megan McCardle Is Always Wrong

Fair warning:  what follows couldn’t be more irrelevant in the face of the very real craziness that daily attends us.  Seriously.  This post takes roughly 1500 words to demolish a single tweet by someone better ignored altogether, Megan McArdle.  A waste, I know.

But now, courtesy of TBogg, she’s hung such a tempting curveball that I can’t resist doing that dastardly old trick of applying data to her claims.  And once again, she’s not just wrong. She’s wholly, stupidly and utterly unnecessarily wrong.  It’s my problem that I spent the effort needed to dissect that error.  What you do with that work is your concern.

So, thus warned, if you read on, don’t come to me crying about the minutes of your life you’ll never get back.
——————-

Megan McArdle likes to impress her fans with the weight of her learning.  And it appears she is now taking a stroll through turf I know something about:  The Best American Science and Nature Writing series.  In a tweet, she tells her admiring bog that she is…

“Re-reading “Best Science and Nature Writing of 2005. Liked series way better before every single article had to be about the environment.”

Well, to be sure, I’m deeply moved by McArdle’s sense of aesthetic loss—but it does seem revealing that a self-described economics writer would be so offended by too great a concern for the mother of all externalities.

Anyway, let’s just move on to the blunt fact that, as usual, she’s wrong. More »

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Always wrong

I have to confess that I was not able to understand what, exactly, Megan McArdle thinks Republicans should do here, but if I were in the Republican House leadership, I would figure out exactly what it is, and then not do it.

It’s a win win—better for the GOP, better for the country. And if I’m wrong, and he does force a default, then it’s the fault of the Democrats, not you! It doesn’t get much better than that, right?

The Iraq War, the Matt Yglesias beat down…if history is any guide, seriously, whatever it is, Republicans shouldn’t do it.

Update. Way I feel is, you don’t own a default.

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But I prefer….alcohol

Skippy-san finds McMegan hating all the demon rum in the Atlas Shrugged movie.

I know that some Rand fans who like the movie are going to accuse me of sucking up to my liberal cocktail-party attending friends by unfairly slamming a damn fine film. The sad truth is that I don’t attend that many cocktail parties–certainly not as many as the people in this film. Ayn Rand’s characters are already so understated as to be nearly wooden–her sensibility was heavily influenced by the “strong but silent” aesthetic of the penny adventure serials of her youth. And in the hands of these actors, they’re practically petrified. In lieu of emotions, the entire cast seems to have turned to drink. Half the action takes place over a glass of wine or a tumbler of whiskey. I suppose this is what you have to expect from a roomful of rigid, controlling people who have difficulty speaking about any emotions that don’t involve metallurgical studies.

I don’t really have a point here, except that only McMegan could botch a review of a shitty movie this badly and that Skippy-san (and others) should be rewarded for reading McMegan so that I don’t have to, apres Sully.

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Her Nutcake Brings All The Boys To The Yard

Sometimes, I’m really rendered speechless.

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Rhymes with winning

Even middle-class-hating right-wing sociopaths Megan McArdle and Chuck Lane think progressives are winning the battle of Madison.

In the absence of a clearer reform message from Walker, gauzy rhetoric about the “right” to collective bargaining, “worker power” and the like has dominated, obscuring the sometimes grubby realities of public-sector unionism.

Well, I think we know the answer: the Democrats are winning the PR battle, and a large majority of Americans are against what Walker is doing. Probably the GOP wouldn’t do this again, if they had their druthers. But of course, it’s easier to not do something in the first place, than it is to back down once you’re all in . . .

I don’t know, winning, anyone? That would be us.

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Those who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear

The ever clueless McMegan on Wisconsin unions:

There’s just one problem with this: if the union hasn’t managed to secure anything in the way of extra wages, benefits, or other concessions for the workers—if it is really true that all these things are close to the minimum required simply to attract workers—then who cares whether the union survives or not? What “power” is being taken away?

Gee, I wonder why people in a union might want to have the ability to bargain collectively even if they’re not asking for wage increases this very moment? Republican politicians have never shown any hostility to public workers; conservatives never have sexual fantasies about forcing teachers to “absorb the pain”.

While we’re at it, I wonder why African-Americans felt they had to form groups like the NAACP and the SNCC to fight for civil rights. Couldn’t they just have argued—calmly, civilly, seriously—as individuals? Assuming Hayekian principles, shouldn’t the free market have taken care of all of that?

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Megan McArdle is Always Wrong (Again!): Kitchen History Edition

There are those who think the least snark directed Megan McArdle’s way is a waste of time—that her Our Lady of Perpetual Error persona is a considered ploy to grab enough attention to make it worth her masters’ while to retain her as Business and Economics Editor of the Atlantic. (Yes, the sound you just heard was Emerson spinning in his grave.)

Me, I’m actually sympathetic to that view, for all the joy I’ve taken in McArdle gigging over the last few years.  It would be better for both the body politic and the culture at large if McArdle’s fifteen minutes simply dwindled to their inevitable end. Certainly, I’m not helping every time some new catastrophe evokes a bloggy response.

But the problem is that her quarter of an hour is not yet over, and McArdle is still The Atlantic’s most prominent economics blogger, and she continues to weigh in on a whole raft of stuff about which she willfully knows nothing, all in order to advance an agenda that has only one item:  to comfort the comfortable.

So, despite the truth that each time someone points out she’s made another howler it only adds to her profile, I think there is a duty to do so. Once upon a time, in organizations that saw themselves as doing real journalism for audiences with an understanding of the term,  errors actually mattered.  Anyone starting out would get a chance or two, or even three.  But when gastritis broke your calculator once too often, you’d seek a new line of work.  You’d go become a shill, perhaps—a time honored retreat into expense account heaven for plenty of hacks who couldn’t hack the hard work of actually getting stuff right … or for whom, as in McArdle’s case, getting things wrong is a feature and not a bug.  That this hasn’t happened here is a problem for McArdle’s colleagues, I think, or it ought to be…about which a little more below.

So what’s today’s problem post?  Nothing overtly political actually, which in some ways makes the case of McArdle’s unfitness for her claimed role yet more clear.   In her post, “The Economics of Kitchens,” she attempts to engage an ongoing discussion between Paul Krugman and Tyler Cowen on the pace of innovation.  Krugman and Cowen point out that there isn’t a whole lot new in kitchens today compared with those of sixty years ago.  Not so, says McArdle.  Rather, we live now in culinary paradise compared to those bad old days:

1953 kitchens did not have electric drip coffee brewers, stand mixers, blenders, food processors, or crock pots….

Err, no.  I’ll give McArdle this.  Electric drip coffee makers do first appear in the 1970s.  The electric vacuum coffee maker was, however, a common appliance and a very competitive marketplace. Not to mention that it was a technology that offered such incredibly cool options as the Faberware Coffee Robot:

Stand mixers in the 1950s?  Oh, you mean the standing mixer invented in 1908 by Herbert Johnson, sold to commercial bakers in 1915, and released for the home as the KitchenAid Food Preparer in…wait for it…1919?  Sunbeam released its cheaper alternative in the ‘30s, and in 1954, (that kitchen of the 50s thing again) one could actually purchase a KitchenAid in a color other than white.

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Open thread

I can probably explain why I didn’t see this, which is that I was driving all day and working on 2000 calories a day of Sbarro’s pizza and coffee. As anyone who has done this can attest, this does leave you a little fuzzy.

What’s going on in your happy Galtian enclave tonight?

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This set down

Now, look. I know that not all of you are accountants or economists or mathematicians or engineers. But let’s suppose I said to you that in 2003 the United States GDP was around 11 trillion and that is was expected to grow at an average rate of 4% or less over the next 20 years. You could get out a spreadsheet and come up with a reasonable upper bound of $327 trillion for the total GDP over those 20 years, right? Many of you could probably even do the rough estimate in your head that on average over those 20 years, it couldn’t be more than $20 trillion a year so that the total would be $400 trillion or less.

Suppose someone said to you that:

The (Iraq) war will certainly cost more than the $60b and change that the President is asking for. But it is not going to run us several trillion dollars (though even if it did, that would work out to less than 0.1% of GDP over the next 20 years.)

You’d register that “several trillion” means something like 3-4 trillion or more and say “nope, you mean 1% not 0.1%”, right? And if you yourself had made the 0.1% estimate and someone told you, nope, you’re wrong, it’s 1% and then explained to you in painstaking detail why several trillion is about 1%, not 0.1%, of $327 trillion, you would understand, right?

Because you know how to follow a link and operate a fucking calculator right?

Don’t be afraid to say that no, you couldn’t do any of this, that you can’t follow what it means to divide 4 by 400 and you have no fucking idea why 3-4 trillion is 1%, not 0.1%, of 400 trillion. Because if you can’t perform these simple calculations, then you too can be the Business and Economics Editor of the Atlantic, you too can earn close to 200K a year, and appear on shows like NPR’s Marketplace.

I realize this is my second post on this not-very-important topic. I’ve talked about this enough and I’ll shut up now.

Because the Atlantic comments thing is slow to load and so on, I am attaching a pdf this time. The thread I am describing can be found here.

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Sometimes the Snark Writes Itself, Megan McArdle edition

Update, Correction, and (gulp) Apology:

As Megan McArdle notes below—very mildly, I’d add, given the provocation—there is a material error in this post, right there in the first line below this correction.

I said “She actually writes…” when, as she says, she did not.  The quoted lines below are from the Post itself.  McArdle was quoting the Post’s ombudman, Andrew Alexander.

Whatever one may think of the context of McArdle’s celebration of the Post’s errors, what I wrote was wrong, and I apologize to Ms. McArdle for the error.

Did that hurt to write?  Yes it did. But it is necessary.  Live by the snark, die by it, on occasion.

_

So Megan McArdle actually goes there.  In a post titled “Department of Awful Statistics,” she busts on the Washington Post for its presumed tropism toward arithmetical mistakes.  She actually writes

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Not much of a roll out

I’ve yet to see any of the Villagers come out in favor of the Bowles-Simpson thing. Andrew Sullivan is excited, and is cheerfully heh-indeeding various Koch whores’ positive reactions to it all (while tsk-tsking hippie opposition), but even in today’s fucked up world of political discourse, no one is interested in Sully’s economic opinions.

Krugman hates it, but what does he know?

Update. And, yeah, stick this one on our society’s gravestone:

Much of it is way over my head in terms of the specifics of government programs and the ability to cut them. But the core proposal is honest, real, and vital.

Translation: I don’t know fuck all but the numbers, but I like the sound of serious, painful, sacrifice.

But credit where credit is due, David Broder won’t admit he doesn’t understand the numbers when he flogs it tomorrow morning.

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Fun facts

On the road this weekend so not much time to post, but thought we needed something a little more light-hearted today, so….

• Alabama has an unbelievably long constitution: “At 357,157 words, the document is 12 times longer than the averagestate constitution, 40 times longer than the U.S. Constitution, and is the longest still-operative constitution anywhere in the world.”


• There are a lot of recorded versions of the song “Stagger Lee” and you can read a review of about a couple dozen of them here.


• The Japanese make some incredibly high quality chalk.  I tried some out but I can’t find anywhere to buy it in the US.  Do I need a Japanese chalk mule to get it?

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