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Thomas Sowell writes on politics’ magic words.
… It is too bad that Lincoln is not still around today. He might emancipate us all from our enslavement to words.
When you call something a “stimulus” package, that does not mean that it actually stimulates. The way individuals, banks and businesses in general are hanging onto their money suggests that “sedative” package might be more accurate.
This is not a new phenomenon, peculiar to this administration. President Bush’s “stimulus” package did not stimulate either. The same was true back in the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “pump-priming” by spending government money to get private money flowing.
The circulation of money slowed down back then the way it has slowed down today.
Some of our biggest political fallacies come from accepting words as evidence of realities. “Rent control” laws do not control rent and “gun control” laws do not control guns.
The big cities with the tightest rent control laws in the nation are New York and San Francisco. The nation’s highest rents are in New York and the second-highest are in San Francisco. …
Michael Barone says when it comes to health care and climate, beware of geeks bearing formulas.
Beware of geeks bearing formulas. That’s the lesson most of us have learned from the financial crisis. The “quants” who devised the risk models that induced so many financial institutions to buy mortgage-backed securities thought they had reduced risk down to zero.
Turns out they got a few things wrong. Their formulas were based on only a few years of actual data. Or they failed to take into account the possibility that housing prices would fall. Or that the market for mortgage-backed securities might suddenly stop functioning.
The lesson seems clear. Don’t allow a whole system to become hostage to the workings of some geek’s formula. Keep in mind the possibility that the real world might not behave as the formula indicates.
But, astonishingly, our society seems about to forget that lesson, just as it should have been learned. Congress is poised, at least if the Obama administration gets its way, to pass major new laws on carbon emissions and on health care whose success depends on geeks bearing formulas. …
Ron Brownstein took exception to the items about the kid president’s divisiveness. Peter Wehner answers him in Contentions.
… Several of the points Brownstein makes are legitimate. For example, Obama still maintains significant support among independents — though according to Gallup, Bush’s support among independents was by the end of April 2001 slightly higher than Obama’s is right now.
Still, in several respects, Brownstein’s analysis is either incomplete or simply wrong. For example, what Brownstein doesn’t say, but what is highly relevant, is that according to the Gallup Poll, Obama has lost 16 points of support among Republicans since his Inauguration. President Bush actually gained 5 points in approval among Democrats (from 32 percent to 37 percent) between his Inauguration and early April. In fact, it wasn’t until Gallup’s September 19-21, 2003 poll — more than two-and-a-half years after he took office — that Bush’s support among Democrats fell the equivalent of a 16-point drop in support from his Inauguration.
The truth is that Obama started his presidency with fairly strong support among Republicans (above 40 percent according to Gallup). This complicates Brownstein’s claim that the GOP has “contracted” in a way that made support for Obama extremely unlikely because it is a party “dominated by conservatives.” In fact, a dozen weeks ago, in a party “dominated by conservatives,” Obama had substantial support from Republicans. That has been squandered. …
Jennifer Rubin says McCain was right when he said BO would raise taxes.
Although not for lack of trying, John McCain was never able to convince voters of — or get the media to focus on — the fallacy of then-candidate Barack Obama’s claim that he would provide a tax break for 95% of voters. Well, with the enormous spending increases it is becoming clearer that a whopping tax increase is in store for many voters. The Hill reports: …
Karl Rove wonders if the GOP can take advantage of the tea parties.
Yesterday was Tax Day, and it was marked by large numbers of Americans turning out for an estimated 2,000 tea parties across the country. This movement is significant.
In 1978, California voters enacted Prop. 13 in reaction to steep property taxes. That marked the start of a tax-cutting movement that culminated in Ronald Reagan slashing high national income taxes in the 1980s. Now Americans are reacting to runaway government spending that they were not told about before last year’s election, and which Americans are growing to resent.
Derided by elitists as phony, the tea-party movement is spontaneous, decentralized, frequently amateurish and sometimes shrill. If it has a father it is CNBC’s Rick Santelli, who called for holding a tea party in Chicago on July 4. Yesterday’s gatherings were made up of people who may never meet again (there’s no central collection point for email addresses). But the concerns driving people to tea parties are real, growing and powerful. Politicians ignore them at their peril. …
The second half of the Vanity Fair Pinch Sulzberger profile is here.
… Arthur is still often referred to as “Young Arthur,” even though he is old enough to be a grandfather, or by the despised nickname that puns on his father’s, “Pinch.” Even as his locks gray and he nears almost two decades as publisher, he remains the prince-in-waiting who once haunted the newsroom in his socks, his trousers held up by colorful suspenders, peering in a harmless but nevertheless insufferably proprietary way over the shoulders of hard-boiled reporters on deadline. “I have heard him many times refer back to ‘when I was a reporter,’” says one former Times executive, theatrically cringing. “He’ll just do it as a throwaway—‘When I was a reporter.’ I will say this to him one day: Don’t say that. You know what? You don’t have to say that. Do you think it’s giving you more credibility with journalists? It actually gives you less.” On the business side, according to one former associate, he was viewed with contempt. “They saw him as insubstantial, as flighty, as glib, and as not caring about them as much as he cared about journalists.”
But Arthur has one big thing going for him, particularly with the reporters and editors who are the real stars in the Times building. Arthur is motivated, as he himself says, not by wealth but by value. He believes, to be sure, that wealth follows from value, but you can see, even as he says it, that the wealth part is not what drives him. Journalism drives him. The Times’s reputation and influence drive him. He is not just a newspaper publisher and a chairman of the board. He is Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., and the pride he feels in that name doesn’t have anything to do with how much is in his bank account. No matter what moves he makes, no matter what errors he commits, Arthur will remain every journalist’s dream publisher. He has long protected the newsroom from predatory managers with their bean-counting priorities, and today he represents its best hope, reporters and editors would like to believe, of weathering the crisis without the soul-killing budget cuts that turn great newspapers into little more than supermarket circulars. The same people who roll their eyes when they hear him wax nostalgic about his years in the newsroom pray for him daily, because, like them, he completely buys the myth: Journalism sells.
“This is ridiculous,” says a former business-side executive at the Times. “It flies in the face of logic and reason, this belief that if your news product is so good and so comprehensive the normal rules of business are suspended. Think about it. Think about the inanity of saying that you survived by putting in more news and cutting ads.”
Arthur repeated this belief proudly in his interview with Rose, describing how Adolph Ochs responded to the lean years after he purchased the paper by expanding its news hole—“We’re going to give our readers more! That’s gutsy!”—and how his grandfather Arthur Hays Sulzberger did something similar during World War II, when newsprint was being rationed: “Major decision, major gutsy decision from him there. Perhaps the critical decision of his time … whether to continue to print ads—revenue, money, profit—or to say, No, we’re going to add more news. He went to news, the Herald Tribune went to ads, and the rest was just a matter of time. By the time the war ended the Times had taken such a huge leadership that it was just a matter of time before the Herald Tribune was to fold.”
This story is false. It is dismissed even in The Trust, a mostly glowing account of the newspaper and the family written with the full cooperation of the Sulzbergers, including Arthur, and published more than a year before he spoke those words to Rose. The authors, Susan E. Tifft and Alex S. Jones, thoroughly debunked the legend.
“One of the enduring myths about The New York Times is that it nobly sacrificed profits from revenue-generating ads during World War II in order to print more news,” wrote Tifft and Jones. “But the truth is somewhat more complicated.” It seems that the Times actually slashed its news hole in this period “far more severely than it cut the space devoted to ads.” With newsprint rationed, and with more ads and news than he could fit, Sulzberger increased space for ads and decreased space for news. In fact, he devoted the majority of the newspaper’s space to ads, and earned more revenue than he had since 1931. Ad revenue “had actually increased during the period, from $13 million to $15 million, while the amount of money spent on news had slumped slightly from $3.9 million to $3.7 million,” Tifft and Jones wrote. …
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