No, it doesn’t exactly matter. (The next two posts really do.) But on the front page of yesterday’s New York Times, Marc Lacey reported the highlighted tidbit about Gabrielle Giffords’ recovery:
LACEY (2/14/11): Representative Gabrielle Giffords, an eloquent speaker before she was shot in the head last month, is relearning the skill—progressing from mouthing words and lip-syncing songs to talking briefly by telephone to her brother-in-law in space.
With a group of friends and family members acting as a backup chorus, Ms. Giffords has been mouthing the lyrics to “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love, Baby.” And as a surprise for her husband, who is celebrating his birthday this month, a longtime friend who has been helping her through her rehabilitation videotaped her mouthing the words to “Happy Birthday to You.”You can pretty much kiss that “surprise” good-bye, if that passage means what it seems to say. But then again, what does that passage say and imply? It’s rather hard to make out.
According to Wikipedia, Mark Kelly’s birthday is next Monday. It hasn’t happened yet.
No, it doesn’t really matter—and there’s no way to tell if surprises were blown. But is any other elite quite as strange, or incoherent, as the gang at the New York Times?
The ten percent solution, or do you understand the budget: We’ll admit it! We were puzzled by Jackie Calmes’ report, in today’s New York Times, about Obama’s budget proposal. By the same newspaper’s lead editorial, in which they discuss the same topic.
(For the record, we’re inclined to list Calmes as one of the bright, sane ones.)
Reading both pieces, we were puzzled by the ease with which Obama has apparently addressed the problem of crippling future deficits.
Why were we puzzled? For the moment, set aside your views about the specific spending cuts Obama has proposed. Instead, focus on the amount of deficit reduction involved in his budget proposal. In this early passage from Calmes’ report, we were struck by the modest amount of reduction Obama has proposed—especially as compared with our current massive deficit:
CALMES (2/15/11): With this year’s deficit projected to hit a record, $1.6 trillion, [Obama] laid out a path for bringing down annual deficits to more sustainable levels over the rest of the decade.
Republicans said it was not nearly enough to address chronic fiscal imbalances and reduce the role of the federal government in the economy and society.
[…]
Nonetheless, with his budget, Mr. Obama was pivoting from the emphasis in his first two years on costly efforts to revive the economy. He said his plan would reduce the total projected deficits over the next decade by $1.1 trillion, or about 10 percent.
His budget, for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1, would cut spending for an array of domestic programs,including community services and environmental protection, and reduce the Pentagon’s previously proposed budget by $78 billion over five years.For the moment, focus on the size of the deficit reduction, not on the specific spending Obama wants to cut.
As everyone knows, we’ve all heard widespread screaming and yelling about the disaster which looms in those future deficits. But how strange! According to Calmes, Obama is only reducing projected deficits “by about ten percent”—and yet, this would “bring down annual deficits to more sustainable levels over the rest of the decade.”
Let’s be clear: According to Calmes, Obama is reducing future deficits by ten percent, not future spending. We thought it odd that such modest reductions could address our looming disaster. But the editors seem even more sanguine today, offering this as they start:
NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL (2/15/11): On paper, President Obama’s new $3.7 trillion budget is encouraging. It makes a number of tough choices to cut the deficit by a projected $1.1 trillion over 10 years, which is enough to prevent an uncontrolled explosion of debt in the next decade and, as a result, reduce the risk of a fiscal crisis.How weird! According to the editors, current budget projections involve “an uncontrolled explosion of debt.” But so what? Cutting those deficits by a mere ten percent—by a mere $100 billion per year—will somehow “prevent” such a crisis! We were even more perplexed when we looked at the first graph below. The graph, which accompanies Calmes’ report, shows where future deficits go under Obama’s proposal.
According to that graph, deficits will be back around three percent of GDP by the second half of the decade. That level of deficit spending is routinely described as “sustainable.”
Question: Why are we in a tizzy about future deficits if they can be controlled so easily? If reducing them by a modest amount gets things back to “sustainable” levels? According to Calmes, Obama’s proposal only reduces future deficits by “about ten percent.” And yet, presto! Just like that, those future deficits seem to fall into line!
To us, this would suggest that we don’t face a terrible deficit problem in the next ten years. So why do we hear all the screaming and yelling? Do you understand how this works?
Our guess: That chart is accurate, but highly misleading, in a very familiar way. But do you understand how this fandango works? Could you explain this material? We’re quoting from our nation’s most important newspaper, after all. Do you understand these reports?
Do you understand this odd situation? More on this topic tomorrow, with a nod to this post by Kevin Drum, even after its modest revision.
From Kevin, via us via Jay via Loveless: Kevin notes those international test scores from 1964 (click here). If you care about public schools, it’s important to know such things.
One more important note: Our international performance has held its own, or has improved, even as changing student demographics have made the challenges tougher in our public schools. When corporate hacks insist that our teachers have failed, you ought to remember such things. Yes, these things actually matter.
