Some opinion columns just improve over time - The Campaign of Magical Thinking is one of them

"...message has been fact-checked and refuted over and over again..."- James Surowiecki.

Before tossing old copies of The New Yorker, I always thumb through the editions to be sure I didn't miss something I had intended to read. This particular article is a perfect example.

In fact, when I read this essay, I thought the date at the bottom of the page must have been wrong! March 21, 2016? But no. So, I am giving the article a blog "re-print". I went to the website to download this "voo-doo" economics article because the message is crystal clear and resonates with today. What's even more relevant, three years after it was published, is how Republicans are lock step out of touch with reality.

Thank you to author James Surowiecki*, for writing this echo....

In 1980, the third-party Presidential candidate John Anderson succinctly summed up Ronald Reagan’s promise to simultaneously cut taxes, increase defense spending, keep government services intact, and balance the budget: “Reagan’s budget is constructed with mirrors.” 

Sure enough, Reagan presided over eight years of deficits that tripled the national debt. Yet the Republican faith that you can tax-cut your way to deficit reduction has never dimmed. This year’s Republican race is dominated by candidates whose budgetary plans make Reagan’s look downright reasonable.

Not surprisingly, the most extreme plan is Donald Trump’s. He would slash taxes across the board, reducing revenues by nine and a half trillion dollars over the next decade, according to estimates by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. Yet he has also promised to balance the budget, protect Social Security and Medicare, and not cut services. How? Well, he says he’ll get rid of “waste and fraud and abuse,” and abolish the Department of Education and the Environmental Protection Agency. And he thinks that the tax cuts would spur an economic boom, so that revenues will actually increase.

This is pure fantasy. Those spending cuts would save just a tiny fraction of what he claims, and the revenue projections have no basis in reality. Yet, unrealistic as Trump’s ideas are, they differ from those of his chief opponents only in degree, not in kind. Marco Rubio wants to couple a $6.8-trillion tax cut with significant increases in defense spending, while Ted Cruz has proposed an $8.6-trillion tax cut with—guess what?—significant increases in defense spending. Naturally, Rubio and Cruz have been vague about where they’d find the necessary trillions in cuts, and about how what the government does would be affected. This is par for the course. Paul Ryan’s infamous budget of 2012 would have effectively eliminated nearly all the federal government’s non-defense discretionary spending, even as he insisted that he wanted to “strengthen” the social safety net and keep the government investing in infrastructure.

The candidates are engaged in a familiar dance. Voters always say that they’re worried about the deficit, but, as Brendan Nyhan, an assistant professor of government at Dartmouth, put it to me, they’re skittish when cuts are specified: “They may have a symbolic preference for cutting spending, but that’s different from their actual preference for spending on programs they like.” (A 2012 Pew poll found that the only program that voters were happy to cut was foreign aid.) So talking about spending cuts is risky: it’s safer to emphasize just the tax-cut part of your message. Still, we’ve now had thirty-five years of Republican candidates promising tax cuts, spending discipline, and balanced budgets, without ever delivering. Why haven’t voters woken up to this?
For one thing, decades of rhetoric about waste in Washington—one of Reagan’s favorite talking points—have skewed voter perceptions. “People think that there are a lot of ways to end fraud that would help balance the budget,” Nyhan says. Forty-nine per cent of those surveyed in a 2013 Fox News poll agreed that cutting “waste and fraud” could eliminate the national debt. In addition, voters have a poor sense of how government money is spent. When Trump says that he wants to close the Department of Education and the E.P.A., it might sound like a big saving. Yet their combined budgets amount to a small fraction of his proposed tax cut. Likewise with foreign aid: polls show that Americans think as much as a quarter of the federal budget goes to other countries, when it’s actually less than one per cent of total spending.

Voters have also been led to believe that tax cuts unleash such a tidal wave of growth that they pay for themselves. This supply-side dogma holds that, because tax cuts encourage people to work more and invest more (which is true), they can increase tax revenues relative to holding rates steady (which is not true). The empirical evidence is by now unequivocal that, with tax rates at U.S. levels, this doesn’t work; cutting tax rates simply leads to lower tax revenues, which is why, in the wake of the Reagan tax cuts, tax revenues as a share of G.D.P. fell. Yet for thirty-five years, through the Contract with America and the Bush Administration’s $1.6-trillion tax cut, the message has remained essentially the same: lower taxes, higher tax revenues. This message has been fact-checked and refuted over and over again, but, once something becomes an article of political faith, it’s difficult to dislodge. Indeed, Nyhan and the political scientist Jason Reifler carried out a study demonstrating that attempts to set the record straight can even reinforce misperceptions: self-described conservatives were shown evidence that the Bush tax cuts had lowered over-all revenues, but, Nyhan told me, “the information actually made them more likely to believe that the tax cuts had increased revenue.”

Voters didn’t come up with these misperceptions on their own. “The ideas spread because politicians and pundits told people they were true,” Nyhan says. “And once misperceptions are out there they’re very difficult to overcome.” In proffering a tax plan that seems self-evidently absurd, Trump is merely building on the foundation that Republican predecessors laid down and, as is his wont, pushing their ideas further than anyone thought they could go. In Trump, the Republican establishment has met its enemy: itself.

*James Surowiecki is the author of “The Wisdom of Crowds.”

As Stupid Sequester Cuts Take Hold - Republicans Wrongly Point to Earned Entitlements to Their Peril

"No one ever says they'll wonder if the US Army will be there when they get old...." James Surowiecki

Social Security and Medicare are earned entitlements, therefore, not responsible for the deficit the US Congress racked up when the Republicans launched two unfunded wars (Iraq and Afghanistan  and the Medicare Part D drug benefit.  

So, when the #stupid_sequester (a Twitter handle) began on March 1st, the same Republicans who dug the deficit hole should raise the revenues to fill it - and keep their hands off of Social Security and Medicare.  

Following is an opinion from The Financial Page of The New Yorker (December 24 and 31, 2012) by James Surowiecki, explaining how Republicans are wrong minded about cuts to Social Security and Medicare:  "In Funds We Trust":

One of the most influential ideas in Washington these days is that Social Security and Medicare are on the verge of going bust. 

Earlier this month, Senator Lindsey Graham warned of the “imminent bankruptcy” of these insurance programs for the elderly, and Republican leaders are citing the threat of insolvency as a reason that entitlement reform must be part of any fiscal-cliff deal. The argument sounds reasonable enough, but it’s really a bid to turn the great political strength of these programs—the fact that they were designed to be self-supporting—into a weakness.

Unlike most government programs, Social Security and, in part, Medicare are funded by payroll taxes dedicated specifically to them. Some of the tax revenue pays for current benefits; anything that’s left over goes into trust funds for the future. The programs were designed this way for political reasons. When F.D.R. introduced Social Security, he calculated that funding it through a payroll tax rather than out of general tax revenue would make people think of the program not as welfare but as an entitlement—as something that they had paid for and had a right to. Many liberals initially opposed the idea, because payroll tax rates aren’t progressive (everyone pays the same rate) and because they tax only labor income. But the system proved as resilient as F.D.R. had predicted, and when Lyndon Johnson introduced Medicare, in the nineteen-sixties, he adopted it, too. Over the years, Social Security and Medicare taxes have risen sharply, to the point where payroll taxes account for thirty-six per cent of all federal revenue. Today, most American households pay more in payroll taxes than in income tax. Yet there’s little public hostility to these taxes, and the programs they fund remain enormously popular.

But the trust-fund strategy has an Achilles’ heel: funds can run out of money. Projections show that, owing to an aging population and rising health-care costs, the Medicare Trust Fund will become insolvent in 2024 and Social Security in 2033. The image of empty coffers is a powerful one: half of all Americans aged between eighteen and twenty-nine don’t think that Social Security will exist when they retire. That’s a bizarre thing to believe about an important government program. No one ever says, “I don’t think the U.S. Army will be there when I get old” or talks about the Defense Department “going broke.” We assume that there will always be a need for the military, and that we’ll end up paying the taxes that are necessary to fund it. But, because Social Security and Medicare have always been self-supporting, it’s easy to believe that they’ll just vanish if the trust funds dry up. This isn’t the case. Relatively minor tweaks to Social Security will allow it to keep paying full benefits for many decades. And, if we wanted, we could supplement funding for both programs with general government revenue. That’s what most European countries do, and, indeed, parts of Medicare are already paid for out of general revenue. The only way that Social Security and Medicare can go “bankrupt” is if we let them.

So why are politicians obsessed with the question of solvency? Because it makes cutting entitlements seem inevitable, rather than a political choice. After all, if you’re in favor of cutting entitlements, that means you’re in favor of spending less money taking care of old people. That’s a tenable position, but it’s politically dicey—particularly for Republicans, since the elderly are among their biggest supporters. It’s far more palatable to argue that we simply have to cut benefits, because otherwise the programs will go bankrupt. That’s why when, in 2011, Paul Ryan introduced a plan to effectively replace Medicare with a voucher system he said that he was doing so in order to preserve Medicare for future generations. Hand-wringing about Medicare and Social Security going bust allows Republicans, paradoxically, to portray themselves not as opponents of entitlement spending but, rather, as its saviors.

This isn’t just a rhetorical problem. It leads to terrible policy. You can see that in the current debate over the proposal to raise the age of Medicare eligibility from sixty-five to sixty-seven, a proposal that, some have suggested, President Obama may agree to as part of a fiscal-cliff deal. This is not a good idea: though it would save taxpayers close to six billion dollars a year, it would raise over-all health-care spending by more than eleven billion dollars a year, according to an estimate by the Kaiser Family Foundation. (That’s because Medicare is better at holding down costs than private insurance, and because the out-of-pocket costs for ineligible seniors would rise.) Sure, it would extend the life of Medicare, but that’s meaningless on its own: you could extend the life of Medicare indefinitely if you restricted it to people over eighty-five, but that doesn’t mean it’s smart to do so. Only an obsession with the trust fund makes kicking people off Medicare seem like a rational approach to our health-care problems.

There are legitimate reasons to be worried about entitlement spending. But the fundamental question is not how much longer the Social Security and Medicare trust funds are going to be solvent. The question is how much we’re willing to spend to insure that the elderly have affordable access to health care and some financial security. The political virtue of the trust-fund strategy has been to make it seem as if Social Security and Medicare run on autopilot. But it has also meant that we’ve never had an honest debate about the value, and the cost, of social insurance. That’s the argument that politicians should be having, instead of a disingenuous one about solvency. - James Surowiecki is an American journalist. He is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he writes a regular column on business and finance called "The Financial Page". Wikipedia

It seems to me the Republicans are setting up Democrats by railing on and on about their wrong minded concept of "entitlements".  The GOP desperately wants to trap the Democrats into cutting these important safety net programs so they'll be able to point fingers and thereby stop looking like the "stupid party", a label many of them so rightly deserve.

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal has branded the Republican party as "stupid". He ways his GOP must stop being the "stupid party".

“It is no secret we had a number of Republicans damage our brand this year with offensive, bizarre comments -- enough of that,” Jindal told Politico.

Well, in my opinion, Democrats and President Barack Obama, are falling victims to the "stupid party" trap by including cuts to entitlements in the administration's budget, just because Republicans want them curtailed.

"Stupid is as stupid does", said the fictional character Forrest Gump.

If Democrats fall into this Republican trap and follow through with cuts to entitlements, they will have flipped the "stupid" label on themselves. Republicans will point fingers like bully children in a playground. "See, they did it, they did it". And, if this happens, Democrats will cry all the way home.

But, a smart party of Democrats will see this selfish Republican ploy for what it is - as a means of keeping taxes low for rich people, rather than as the way to protect our hard earned entitlements.

So, as the #stupid_sequester takes hold, let the "stupid party" of Republicans figure out how to dig themselves out of the deficit hole they created by raising revenues - through taxation.