unSpun_ Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation - Brooks Jackson [16]
The warning sign is simple: if it sounds like J. Wellington Wimpy, it’s likely to be a trick. Wimpy, a friend of Popeye, was an unscrupulous glutton who tried to snag a free meal with the classic line: “I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.” That “pay you Tuesday” element should raise suspicions.
In politics it’s a little different but the principle is the same. We, the voters, are going to get our hamburger today. That is, we will if only we vote for the right candidate, who promises we won’t have to pay until Tuesday, if ever. The difference is that Wimpy doesn’t intend to pay, but we or our children will have to. In general, Democrats promise social programs without mentioning future costs to taxpayers, while Republicans promise reduced taxes but are vague about future deficits or program cuts.
Democrats constantly promise to “preserve Social Security” without mentioning that to finance the benefits scheduled in current law will require a sizable tax increase. Official projections issued in May 2006 put the shortfall at $4.6 trillion over the next seventy-five years. To put that in perspective, the shortfall amounts to more than a third of the entire U.S. economy for the year 2006. To be paid Tuesday, of course.
Bush, for his part, promised to “pay Tuesday” for the war in Iraq, for his tax cuts, and for big increases in domestic spending, including a prescription drug benefit that is the largest expansion of Medicare in its history. The president assured the nation in his 2002 State of the Union address: “Our budget will run a deficit that will be small and short-term”—but as it turned out the deficit ballooned to $413 billion in 2004, a record measured in raw dollars and much above average even measured as a percentage of the economy. The deficit was still $318 billion the following year and an estimated $250 billion the next, and deficits of between $266 billion and $328 billion were projected each year for the remainder of the decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Those deficits are hardly “small” and certainly not “short-term,” as the president had predicted. When “Tuesday” arrives somebody is going to be stuck with a very large tab.
WARNING SIGN: The Blame Game
TO HEAR PRESIDENT BUSH TALK, YOU WOULD THINK THAT GREEDY lawyers are a major factor in the rising cost of health care. “One of the major cost drivers in the delivery of health care are [sic] these junk and frivolous lawsuits,” he said in 2004. He insisted that doctors ordering needless tests and procedures for fear of being sued were costing federal taxpayers “at least $28 billion a year” in added costs to government medical programs. This claim rested mainly on a single 1996 study suggesting that “defensive medicine” accounted for 5 percent to 9 percent of total spending on health care. However, that conclusion had been contradicted by just about every other researcher who had looked at the problem.
The basis of Bush’s blame-the-lawyers claim was disputed by both the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Government Accountability Office (GAO), respected and politically neutral investigative agencies. After examining all the research on the subject, the CBO found “no evidence” that caps on damage awards of the sort Bush sought would reduce medical spending. “In short, the evidence available to date does not make a strong case that restricting malpractice liability would have a significant effect, either positive or negative, on economic efficiency,” the CBO said.
Bush was engaging in the blame game, pointing a finger at an unpopular group and hoping to divert attention from the weakness of his own evidence. People who find their own position weak or indefensible often attack. That’s why