POAC VII a.: Tax cuts and revenue

I'm delighted to see the subject of tax cuts and revenue broached at the rather poor Project for the Old American Century "counter-spin" page.

The talking point
Tax cuts generate revenue and pay for themselves

The facts
A host of studies, some of them written by economists who served in the Bush administration, have concluded that tax reductions mean less money for the Treasury. They may help spur economic growth, but they still lose more revenue than they generate.
(POAC)

The link in this case refers to a different page at the POAC Web site, which contains another link to the original (or what was once the original: "The requested article was not found."). That link ended at the "McClatchy Washington Bureau," formerly run by Knight-Ridder.

The article, despite a glowing review of the Washington Bureau by the American Journalism Review, simply isn't very good, as I shall show.

Here's the headline:

Tax cuts lose more money than they generate, studies conclude

Even though this headline is ultimately misleading, it's actually better than what Republican ideas get in the mainstream press. The headline implicitly admits that tax cuts generate revenue. Where was this type of incisive reporting on the approach to the 2004 election?

Mr Bush's tax cuts have been staggering in their scope and audacity. A report this month showed that Bush's $270bn tax cut last year, which the Republicans said would boost growth and jobs, had overwhelmingly gone to the rich, as sceptics such as Harvard economist Paul Krugman have long argued.
(Salon, August 23, 2004)

Not a peep that some of that $270 billion is coming back in the form of revenue? Wonder why?

But let's move on to the content of the article instead of belaboring other past failures of the mainstream press.

At a ceremony on the White House lawn, Bush said his tax cuts had helped the economy grow, "which means more tax revenue for the federal Treasury."

That's just not true. A host of studies, some of them written by economists who served in the Bush administration, have concluded that tax reductions mean less money for the Treasury.
(POAC)

Kevin G. Hall wrote the story. Note the disconnect between what Bush said and the message that Hall carries from it. Bush makes two claims.

First, that the tax cuts helped the economy grow. That point isn't argued seriously, in my experience. The tax cuts did help the economy.

Second, Bush claims that a growing economy increases tax revenues. That is also true.

For Hall, this means that Bush is saying that cutting taxes results in increased net revenues, since that is the proposition, by implication and context, that he describes as "just not true."

But Hall's problems don't stop with his creative interpretation of the president's words. What is this "host of studies"?

The first "study" mentioned is a proposed model for evaluating the net effect of tax cuts.

The paper, written by N. Gregory Mankiw and Matthew Weinzeirl of Harvard, was titled "Dynamic Scoring: A Back-of-the-Envelope Guide." Now you know why Hall did not name the study.

Hall reports on the paper incompletely, with significant omissions.

The authors make plain that key factors were not taken into account in the study, such as the "short-run Keynesian effects," (page 20, second paragraph) which refers to the economic effects of government policies. In other words, the paper discounted the effects of (short-run Keynesian) economic growth in making its estimations, which is the point at issue in the words uttered by Bush.

Hall also uses a quotation regarding the 17 percent return on a labor tax cut, whereas the context (page 10) reveals that the return may fluctuate considerably owing to a variety of factors.

This seems to indicate that Hall gave the Mankiw-Weinzeirl paper a cursory examination.

More from the "host of studies" in part b, coming soon.

POAC VI

Next in the queu from the "Counterspin" tomfoolery at People for an Old American Century (get it? Yuk-yuk-yuk) is this bit of silliness:

The talking point
The New York Times disclosed vital secrets in the War on Terror™ by publishing an article on the gov't secretly monitoring financial transactions without a warrant.
(POAC)

"[V]ital secrets," eh?
I tried googling that term in connection with the New York Times, since it was the main paper criticized with respect to the monetary transaction leak.
I was a bit surprised to find a likely hit on the second page of results--only it turned out to be a liberal blog.
Ordinarily I don't interrupt the sludgy flow of thought, but as a reader of conservative blogs (as well as the liberal bloghopping I enjoy), the claim just didn't look familiar. The blogs I frequent didn't use that kind of language. More on that later.

The facts
Not only has the administration been bragging about their funds transfer tracking system, they've been publicly giving our far more details than the NYT

Two things real quick.
1) This response fits the form of the "tu quoque" ("You, too!") fallacy. The fallacy consists of evading responsibility for an action because somebody else engaged in the same action. However ...
2) The link leads to an article that discussed a completely different program--a domestic program rather than an international program.

The main complaint against the New York Times (and the LA Times) has been that they are publishing classified information, however, not that the specific information relating to foreign financial transactions was "vital" in any strong sense. That information was "vital" in that the publication in a major daily may well lead to casualties as some terrorists might escape capture because of greater caution.

It's fair to criticize the government's disclosures on the same basis--but the government made the judgment that some information about government response to terrorism should be published--and they certainly put some thought into how much to divulge.
In this case, the government made a determination that certain information was to remain secret in order to catch more terrorists and the New York times arrogated to itself the responsibility for divulging the government's secret once it had been illegally leaked (against the express advice of the government.

That's a big difference, and it is completely ignored in the POAC version of "the facts."

This is an amazing streak. How long can POAC keep it up?

POAC V

Yeesh. This is the worst one so far.

The talking point
Saddam Hussein had connections to Al-Qaeda

Senate report finds no Hussein-Al Qaeda ties. The Niger-Iraq connection also did not exist.
(POAC)

Usually the "facts" occur via a live link; this one was broken.
It formerly linked to a story in the Chicago Tribune, but maybe the Tribune regretted publishing the article, because it is gone.

Here is a .pdf file of a large portion of the report, concerning Hussein.

I've complained about this senate report before, noting that its conclusions fly in the face of the evidence. Headlines declared that there were no ties, but in the report itself (page 64) we find:

(U) In June 2002, the CIA characterized the relationship between Saddam and bin Laden:

In contrast to the traditional patron-client relationship Iraq enjoys with secular Palestinian groups, the ties between Saddam and bin Laden appear much like those between rival intelligence services, with each trying to exploit the other for its own benefit.

No ties, except that the nonexistent ties resemble a certain type of tie according to the CIA.

And there's an affirmation that Hussein's Iraq had discussion with al Qaeda:

(U) During his testimony to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in September 2002, Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet stated that, "The intelligence indicates that the two sides at various points have discussed safe-haven, training and reciprocal non-aggression. There are several reported suggestions by al-Qa'ida to Iraq about joint terrorist ventures, but in no case can we establish that Iraq accepted or followed up on these suggestions.

In other words, there was a diplomatic relationship between Hussein and al Qaeda supported by evidence, but no evidence of a collaborative relationship between the two.

Liberals seem fond of noting the lack of evidence for a collaborative relationship to support (via the dual fallacies of equivocation and appeal to ignorance) the claim that there was no relationship between Hussein and al Qaeda at all.

As the evidence from the report shows (even if it doesn't dawn on our fine senators enough to make it into their conclusion), there was evidence for a diplomatic relationship, and we still don't know to what extent, if any, a collaborative relationship existed.

There is evidence of a collaborative relationship, by the way, but it's tenuous.

POAC blows it with the overbroad claim of no relationship between Hussein and al Qaida. There was a diplomatic relationship, but little evidence of collaboration. You can raise doubt about a claim by citing a lack of evidence, but you can't debunk it by that method.

There's plenty more in the senate report that should debunk the conclusions of the report. Read it sometime (I'll recommend page 68 in addition to what I've sampled here).

***

We also have the claim that there was no tie between Hussein and Niger. On the contrary, Joe Wilson's own report confirmed that Iraqi officials approached Niger to establish trade (uranium is just about the only thing that Niger has worth trading), and the Nigerian official to whom Wilson spoke reportedly took the overture as an offer to trade for uranium.

Wilson inexplicably left that out of his article about what he didn't find in Niger (inexplicable unless he had a political axe to grind by lying about what he found in Niger).

Christopher Hitchens handling of the English language makes for a delightful account of Wilson's adventure.

That's now five utter failures in a row for POAC.

POAC IV

Here's another in a series of "My talking point is better than your talking point" entries at the Project for an Old American Century's "Counterspin" page.

The talking point
Iranian President Ahmadinejad has repeatedly threatened to destroy Israel

The facts
The most infamous quote, "Israel must be wiped off the map", is the most glaringly wrong. In his October 2005 speech, Mr. Ahmadinejad never used the word "map" or the term "wiped off". According to Farsi-language experts like Juan Cole and even right-wing services like MEMRI, what he actually said was "this regime that is occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time." His message was, in essence, "This too shall pass."
(POAC)

And the less infamous quotations are, I suppose, less glaringly wrong.
So let's examine the claim above.
The material comes from Virginia Tilley, a professor at the University of Wisconsin.

Later in her article, Tilley uses Al Jazeera to provide translations of Ahmadinejad. Here's how Al Jazeera translated the speech in question:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has openly called for Israel to be wiped off the map.

"The establishment of the Zionist regime was a move by the world oppressor against the Islamic world," the president told a conference in Tehran on Wednesday, entitled The World without Zionism. "The skirmishes in the occupied land are part of a war of destiny. The outcome of hundreds of years of war will be defined in Palestinian land," he said. "As the Imam said, Israel must be wiped off the map," said Ahmadinejad, referring to Iran's revolutionary leader Ayat Allah Khomeini. His comments were the first time in years that such a high-ranking Iranian official has called for Israel's eradication, even though such slogans are still regularly used at government
rallies.
(Al Jazeera)

Tilley might as well be saying that Al Jazeera got an entirely wrong impression of Ahmadinejad's speech. She must think the Arab news service is secretly in league with the Zionists in trying to make Ahmadinejad look like a saber-rattler.

Tilley relies on the translation of Juan Cole (University of Michigan).

Cole's interpretation of Ahmadinejad's intent is interesting, to say the least.

"Ahmadinejad did not say he was going to wipe Israel off the map because no such idiom exists in Persian," remarked Juan Cole, a Middle East specialist at the University of Michigan and critic of American policy who has argued that the Iranian president was misquoted. "He did say he hoped its regime, i.e., a Jewish-Zionist state occupying Jerusalem, would collapse." Since Iran has not "attacked another country aggressively for over a century," he said in an e-mail exchange, "I smell the whiff of war propaganda."
(New York Times)

Cole is a critic of American policy? You don't say!

Cole is doing a Clintonesque parsing of Ahmadinejad, where "wiping off the map" does not exist in Persian as an idiom. But what of the meaning of the idiom?

Also, wipe off the face of the earth. Eliminate completely, as in Some day we hope to wipe malaria off the map. This idiom uses wipe in the sense of "obliterate," and map and face of the earth in the sense of "everywhere."
(Answers.com)

Ahmadinejad does seem to have had in mind exactly that sort of fate for Israel.

Remember? The Israel that no Muslim country should acknowledge?

"'I hope that the Palestinians will maintain their wariness and intelligence, much as they have pursued their battles in the past 10 years. This will be a short period, and if we pass through it successfully, the process of the elimination of the Zionist regime will be smooth and simple.

"'I warn all the leaders of the Islamic world to be wary of Fitna: If someone is under the pressure of hegemonic power [i.e. the West] and understands that something is wrong, or he is naïve, or he is an egotist and his hedonism leads him to recognize the Zionist regime – he should know that he will burn in the fire of the Islamic Ummah [nation]…

"'The people who sit in closed rooms cannot decide on this matter. The Islamic people cannot allow this historical enemy to exist in the heart of the Islamic world.

(MEMRI version of Ahmadinejad's speech)

Cole had pointed to MEMRI's rendering of the "wipe Israel off the map" passage as accurate.

The text of Ahmadinejad's speech utterly rebukes Cole's fancifully positive interpretation. Far from simply having the "hope" that Israel will pass away over time, Ahmadinejad very plainly calls for active steps to obliterate the regime from the Middle East (granted, he proposes that Israel could relocate to Europe or even America, but that's just delaying the inevitable since Ahmadinejad's brand of Islam fancies itself as a world-dominating ideology).

Has Cole attempted to explain how Al Jazeera got caught up in spreading war propaganda for the West?

Bottom line, Ahmadinejad is actively working to eliminate Israel, and he probably seriously contemplates using nuclear weapons against Israel toward that end.

A passage from the Ayatollah Khomeini, quoted in an 11th-grade Iranian schoolbook, is revealing. "I am decisively announcing to the whole world that if the world-devourers [i.e., the infidel powers] wish to stand against our religion, we will stand against their whole world and will not cease until the annihilation of all them. Either we all become free, or we will go to the greater freedom which is martyrdom. Either we shake one another's hands in joy at the victory of Islam in the world, or all of us will turn to eternal life and martyrdom. In both cases, victory and success are ours."

In this context, mutual assured destruction, the deterrent that worked so well during the Cold War, would have no meaning. At the end of time, there will be general destruction anyway. What will matter will be the final destination of the dead--hell for the infidels, and heaven for the believers. For people with this mindset, MAD is not a constraint; it is an inducement.
(Opinion Journal)

That's four stinkers in a row from the Project for an Old American Century.

POAC III

The Project for an Old American Century's parade of ineptitude continues ...

The talking point
Lancet report on Iraqi civilian casualties isn't credible

The facts
Report of 650,000 dead Iraqis relied on large sample base, checked death certificates, includes more reliable methodology than previous reports.
(POAC)

This claim concerns the second survey published in the Lancet and designed by researchers at Johns Hopkins. An earlier Lancet survey on the same topic was criticized because of methodological problems and its unusually wide margin of error.
The new study utilized a broader sample, but many questions remained about collected information. Iraq Body Count issued a fairly prompt critique of the Johns Hopkins/Lancet study.
The "facts" offered by POAC come from a partisan source (Richard Horton, publisher of the Lancet--like he's going to say he published rubbish).

So, POAC offers us a single, partisan source as "the facts" and ignores the legitimate criticisms of the study.
Is that great or what?


Summary of Problems

1) The number of clusters (47) does seem small for such a diverse region as Iraq. One defender of the small number of clusters claimed that a small number of samples from a swimming pool would give about the same results as using four times the number of clusters. The whole point of using clusters, however, is to allow data collection where data collection is difficult, and larger numbers of clusters become desirable where the samples are likely to be diverse (as with Iraq, since some parts are much more violent than others).
2) Were the interviews reliably done? The astoundingly high response rate alone gives rise to suspicions that the data were fabricated to some extent (I don't see how the degree can be known).
3) The report claims that cluster sites were chosen "entirely at random" but surveyors were permitted to change the survey site where the randomly selected was deemed unsafe. How could they do that randomly?

This is just the tip of the iceberg regarding the data collection (I recommend the Iraq Body Count critique, and also this one). While the study may not be entirely worthless (given the broad definition of deaths associated with the war), there's no reason to place great faith in the results.

Three in a row, POAC. What kind of streak will you end up with?

POAC II

Here's round two of the critique of the Project for an Old American Century, specifically the "counterspin" page.

The talking point
North Korea's development of nuclear weapons is Clinton's fault

The facts
Some basic facts regarding Clinton, Bush and North Korea
(POAC)

Apparently it's so complicated to explain we have to endure the begging of the question and follow the link.

The link takes us to another page, which repeats the same information, MOL.

Is North Korea's development of nuclear weapons is Clinton's fault?

Some basic facts regarding Clinton and North Korea

At a debate in 2004, President Bush explained that his policy against bilateral talks with North Korea would be effective in preventing them from becoming a nuclear power.

Is it turtles all the way down? Let's try to get to those "basic facts" again. Ah, this link leads us to noted historian Joshua Micah Marshall.
Using a partisan column as proof might convince somebody who already believes the POAC argument, I suppose, but any critical thinker will dig into Marshall's column to judge its reliability against more trustworthy sources.
Here's what Marshall claims:

The 1994 crisis came about because the North Koreans were producing weapons-grade plutonium. Under the Agreed Framework, they agreed to shutter the plutonium production facility and put the already produced plutonium under international oversight.

In return, the US promised aide, help building lightwater reactors (which don't help with bombs) and diplomatic normalization.

That agreement kept the plutonium operation on ice until the end of 2002.

(Talking Points Memo, italics added)

Did the agreement keep the plutonium operation "on ice" until the end of 2002?

"... some have argued that the Agreed Framework was a success despite the cheating. It averted an imminent war, and it shut down the North Korean plutonium program for nine years—thereby limiting Pyongyang's arsenal to one or two nuclear weapons as of 2002, rather than the nearly 100 it might otherwise have been able to develop by then.

In the summer of 2002 U.S. intelligence discovered that the North Koreans had secretly restarted their weapons development using highly enriched uranium. When Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly went to Pyongyang in October of 2002 to confront the North Koreans, he expected them to deny the existence of the uranium program. They didn't; in fact, evidently they soon restarted their plutonium program, by continuing to reprocess the 8,000 spent fuel rods from Yongbyon (which had been in storage since the signing of the Agreed Framework). In October of 2003 the North Koreans said they had finished the reprocessing—meaning, if true, that they had enough fissile material for up to six new nuclear weapons.

(The Atlantic Online, bold emphasis added)

Here's more in the vein from Yale Global Online:

Even more difficult would be finding out if North Korea has actually begun reprocessing plutonium. The process by which plutonium is extracted from spent fuel results in the release of a gaseous Krypton isotope, but that can only be detected by sensors in the immediate vicinity and not by spy planes at 80,000 feet. It is possible that technological advances made in the past decade have given the US better means to detect such activity. Gary Samore, who served in Clinton White House, notes that the US failed to detect North Korean production of plutonium in 1989-1990. Only the IAEA analysis of North Korean data later revealed that reprocessing campaigns conducted in those years gave North Korea enough fissile material to build one or two nuclear bombs.
(YGO)

So, even though we don't know that North Korea wasn't cheating all along, it is apparently assumed by some that North Korea was keeping their agreement despite the fact that they were working on nuclear weapons development secretly.

For still more (the best stuff, really) see this essay by Henry Sokolski of the Nautilus Institute.
Compare it with a prominent view from the other side (Selig Harrison).

As for the supposed claim by Bush that his plan would work, here's the quotation:

"We began a new dialogue with North Korea. One that includes, not only the United States, but now China, and China has a lot of influence over North Korea. Some ways more than we do. As well, we include South Korea, Japan and Russia. Now there are 5 voices speaking to Kim Jong Il, not just one. And so if Kim Jong Il decides again not to honor an agreement, he's not only doing injustice to America, he'll be doing injustice to China as well. And I think this will work. It's not going work if we open up a dialogue with Kim Jong Il."
(President Bush, quoted in The Raw Story)

So, Bush didn't flatly claim that his plan would work (a misrepresentation in the "truth" column, mind you). He stated that he believed that it would work based on the pressure from China--and China has, in fact, leaned on North Korea in the wake of its recent testing. China has no desire to see Japan develop nuclear weapons, for example, and Japan has made strong hints that they will consider a nuclear self-defense program in light of North Korea's behavior.

And how does any of this absolve Clinton of responsibility for the failed 1994 deal without the unfounded assumption that N. Korea was being honest until Bush took office?

Here's the last of POAC's evidence:

"On Sept. 19, 2005, North Korea signed a widely heralded denuclearization agreement with the United States, China, Russia, Japan and South Korea. Pyongyang pledged to "abandon all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs." In return, Washington agreed that the United States and North Korea would "respect each other's sovereignty, exist peacefully together and take steps to normalize their relations." Four days later, the U.S. Treasury Department imposed sweeping financial sanctions against North Korea designed to cut off the country's access to the international banking system, branding it a "criminal state" guilty of counterfeiting, money laundering and trafficking in weapons of mass destruction." "The Bush administration says that this sequence of events was a coincidence." Source: MSNBC

The source isn't just MSNBC, by the way. It's Newsweek. The author is coincidentally the same one that I provided as a counterpoint for the Sokolski essay.

Again, there's nothing in the evidence to remove responsibility from Clinton.

1) It's an assumption that N. Korea's plutonium enrichment was kept "on ice" through the Bush presidency, and it's effectively irrelevant since N. Korea were cheating with uranium enrichment, which achieves the same end (nuclear weapons).
2) Bush's idea of working with China to stop N. Korea's nuclear ambitions did not amount to a guarantee of success, and it absolves Clinton of nothing.
3) Pointing to Bush's recent dealings with N. Korea likewise fails to excuse Clinton's actions, and there's not even a good case there that Bush's actions were not perfectly appropriate.

It's all distraction to place blame on Bush, based on the assumption that N. Korea did not cheat from the start, and based on the assumption that U.S. intelligence was wrong in its estimate that N. Korea had developed nuclear weapons even before the 1994 agreement (and fault in the U.S. government predates Clinton's presidency, I might add).

POAC flubs their Clinton apology.
It wasn't all Clinton's fault, but he certainly bears a significant portion of the blame.

You'd be crazy to get your facts through the POAC filters.

So many bad blogs, so little time ...

While I haven't updated this site much recently, there is work underway.
I've collected information from a number of blogs for the purpose of writing up a blog review for a number of blogs who are bad enough to qualify at BBB.

A Web site I ran across yesterday has drawn my attention, however, so some other projects will stay on the back burner while I focus on the "Project for an Old American Century."

POAC, as it is known, seems to be bad through-and-through based on my survey so far, but the part of the site that most caught my attention was its "Counterspin" page, where POAC claims to provide "[t]he facts behind right wing talking points."

Well, they don't do a very good job.

There are 31 entries, and I'll be going through each one of them with a separate BBB post.
This will be ugly. Once 16 of the claims have been debunked, I'll add POAC to the bloody bad blogs (Bad Blogs' Blood) blogroll.

Here we go with the first one.

The talking point
The mainstream media shows a biased view of the activity in Iraq by focusing on the negative.

The facts
Iraq: The Hidden Story shows the footage used by TV news broadcasts, and compares it with the devastatingly powerful uncensored footage of the aftermath of the carnage that is becoming a part of the fabric of life in Iraq.
(POAC)

So ... if we focus even more on the negative it will show that the MSM does not focus on the negative?

This response from POAC confounds common sense and logic.

It's like saying that sports news doesn't focus on home runs by showing every home run instead of just half of the home runs on a given day of baseball. The film does absolutely nothing to refute the talking point. All it does is create a diversion by getting the reader to think "Well, they could have used even more negative footage, so the amount they used doesn't really focus on the negative!"

Of course the MSM focus on the negative. That's what the consumer-driven society wants to see and hear, oddly enough, and that's what they get more often than not.

"If it bleeds, it leads."

Reasoning of the type displayed in this first entry should embarrass anyone who uses it in ostensibly serious public discourse.

Will it get worse before it gets better? Stay tuned ...