Selective Amnesia

It never ceases to amaze me how the same data, facts and other “concrete” information can be cherry-picked and selected in such a way so as to defend just about any point of view. I expect it from Washington, where people are always trying to score political points and have the far-sightedness of a mole, but it's obvious that this disease can infect us all.

For example, in his March 4th post, “Dad” rather authoritatively stated: “You have to ask yourself why unemployment went from 7.4% in December, 2008 to 10.1% in the first six months under Obama,” and then he followed it with a link to support his statement. (A quick aside on citing evidence: while it can provide back-up and give your opinions more credibility it also allows others to actually look at the evidence themselves. I usually don’t like filling the role of Fact-Checking Police, but it seems that some people just can’t help themselves.)

You see, I actually clicked on the link that you provided and found that your numbers were, well, wrong. First of all, Obama was inaugurated January 20th and didn’t pass his first bill until January 29th, so one could argue that January’s unemployment rate of 7.7% should mark the “pre-Obama" unemployment rate, not December’s rate of 7.4%, but no matter. Even if we stick with your simplified version, unemployment didn’t hit 10.1% until October, which, by all accounts, is the 10th month of the year, not the 6th. I’d hate to think that you would deliberately fudge data to make your point more convincing, so I’ll chalk it up to a simple mathematical error.

But even more interesting to me is the part of the chart that you didn’t mention, namely the 10 months prior to Obama’s inauguration (or I’ll say before January 2009 to keep it consistent). After all, if you are suggesting a direct causal relationship between the presidency of Barack Obama and the 2.7% increase in unemployment from January to October (10.1 – 7.4 = 2.7, for the mathematically-challenged), then I am curious as to what happened during a similar time period before Obama’s inauguration in order to compare it to a “control group,” if you will. Interestingly enough, in the last 10 months of 2008, the unemployment rate went from 4.8% in February to 7.4% in December, a total increase of 2.6% …isn’t that bizarrely close to 2.7%? Are you sure that relationship is causal and not correlative?

I wasn’t going to mention this post earlier because I didn’t want to get bogged down with little things like the misrepresentation of information, but I was reminded of it by John Galt’s recent post on the “Stellar track record of Congress cost predictions.” In his post, John Galt referenced a long list of woefully underestimated budgets provided by Congress, but seems to “forget” about one of history’s most recent and most egregious examples of it: the 2003 Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act, i.e. “the largest overhaul of Medicare in the public health program's 38-year history” according to Wikipedia and “the greatest expansion in America's welfare state in forty years,” as stated by journalist Jan Crawford Greenburg. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_W._Bush#Domestic_policy, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicare_Prescription_Drug,_Improvement,_and_Modernization_Act, respectively)

Now, a lot can be said about this piece of legislation and its almost absolute ineffectiveness (the bill was a virtual hand-out to pharma and insurance companies and did almost nothing in the way of making prescriptions more affordable to the elderly), but for the sake of this argument I’ll stick to the numbers, because the numbers show it to be "the most fiscally irresponsible piece of legislation since the 1960s" according to former U.S. Comptroller General David Walker.

The Bush administration gave an estimated net cost of $395 billion over the 10 years from 2004 – 2013 (well, actually, Medicare’s chief actuary estimated the cost to be closer to $540 billion, but Tom Scully, a Republican political appointee at the Department of Health and Human Services, "threatened to fire him if he dared to make that information public before the vote.” But this is more of an ethical concern, so I wont delve into it here.)

Not surprisingly, one month after the law’s passage the administration revised its cost estimate to a total of $534 billion from 2006 – 2015. Compare that estimate to what Medicare's trustees called in 2009 an "unfunded drug benefit, which added $15.5 trillion (in present value terms) to our nation's indebtedness." Wow! $15.5 trillion! I took the liberty of doing the math, John Galt, and the Bush Administration was off by a factor of over 39 - are you sweating yet?

The numbers here are enough to give any American a bit of sticker shock, but I’m more disturbed by another word tucked into this sentence: “unfunded.” That’s right, the 2003 Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act included absolutely zero provisions for offsets, revenue-raisers or financing of any sort. That's $15.5 trillion directly added to the bottom line of the federal budget deficit. You can find all this and more in the following article by former Treasury Department economist and author, Bruce Bartlett: http://www.forbes.com/2009/11/19/republican-budget-hypocrisy-health-care-opinions-columnists-bruce-bartlett.html

Now, I would love to believe the Congressional Budget Office’s report that the Health Care Reform bill will reduce the projected federal budget deficits by $138 billion over the next decade, but I, too, am sceptical. However, the bill does, among other things, cut back on the tremendously irresponsible handouts that Bush's Medicare bill are funding and it is nice to see Congress trying to cover the costs of the bills it passes for a change... you know, actually trying to pass bills that are deficit neutral. It just seems like, dare I say, the “fiscally responsible” thing to do. Can I use that word? You guys don’t have a Copyright on it, do you?