The King of Pointland

Debatable

This afternoon I watched the Democratic presidential candidates debate in Iowa. Sharpton and Clark were no-shows, but the rest were there. I found it to be moderately informative. Dean did OK, Lieberman confirmed that his positions are the closest to Bush's, and Kucinich continues to be the furthest left. The transcript is here.

Some of you are interested in the candidates' positions on trade. Check out the first page, about half-way down, for a good back-and-forth on the issue. I for one am glad Gephardt took care of that giant sucking sound from Jordan.

I recently read Al Franken's Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. I'll have more to say about in the future, but among (many) other things, Franken takes Bush and others to task for abusing statistics to misrepresent his tax cuts. For example, when discussing who benefited, the amount of the average tax cut is often cited. This figure is arrived at by dividing the total size of the tax cut by the number of individuals or families affected. Because of the disparity in income distribution, this can be misleading. If everybody got a 1 cent tax cut, and I got the rest, the average individual tax cut would be the same. Or, as Franken puts it, "You and Bill Gates probably have an average net worth of $32 billion."

So two weeks ago, former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich and former White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey were on ABC News's This Week discussing Bush's economic policies. At one point, Lindsey plays the averages game, but with a twist:

LAWRENCE LINDSEY: What the secretary did not say was that it's actually those average working families that got the tax cut. Senator Lieberman pointed out in New Hampshire, the average working family in New Hampshire benefited $2700 a year from this tax cut. That's a bigger rise in their take-home pay than they got in any year during the 1990s which was supposed to be such a good time. So in fact, that is the reason for the tax cut. Yes, when we had the bubble burst, when we had the crash, we were in for some tough times. The president knew it. That's why he proposed the tax cut. It is that tax cut that's kept working families with their paychecks growing because of they now take home more of what they earn. And that's what's kept the economy growing and now we've got a self-sustaining economy.

ROBERT REICH: Larry, I've heard again and again, the $2700 average, was the average amount that the average family took back. But when you hear this administration talk about averages, watch your wallet. The basketball player Shaquille O'Neal and I have an average height of six feet. That doesn't tell you very much about what is happening to the average person. People at the top did extremely well, but people, average people did not do well at all. That is, the little guy did not do well at all.

LAWRENCE LINDSEY: I was quoting Senator Lieberman. I'm quoting a Democrat, Bob.

Note that Lindsey didn't refute Reich's argument.

During the debate, Lieberman pulled the same trick again. Earlier, Dean had been asked about his position on Bush's tax cuts:

NORRIS: I have a follow-up for Governor Dean.

A hallmark of your campaign has been the pledge to repeal the Bush tax cuts across the board. Does this include tax cuts that are intended to provide some measure of relief for the middle class, the child tax credit or the lifting of the marriage penalty?

And specifically, what kind of tax relief are you proposing for middle class and working-class families?

DEAN: Well, we've got to look at the big picture. If you make over $1 million, you've got a $112,000 tax cut. Sixty percent of us got a $304 tax cut.

And the question I have for Americans is, did your college tuition go up more than $304 because the president cut Pell Grants in order to finance his tax cuts for his millionaire friends? How about your property taxes, did they go up more than $304 because the president wouldn't fund special ed, wouldn't fund No Child Left Behind, wouldn't fund COPS and -- how about your health care payments? Did they go up more than $304 because the president cut thousands of people all over America off health care because he wouldn't fund the states' share that they needed to continue to insure people, and that was shifted to insurance and the health care premiums?

Middle-class people did not see a tax cut. There was no middle-class tax cut. There was a Bush tax increase with tuitions, with property taxes, with health care premiums, and most middle-class people in this country are worse off because of President Bush's so- called tax cut than they are better off.

Without doing some digging it's hard to know just how the numbers work out, but it seems like a reasonable point.

The next time Lieberman gets asked a question, though, he responds so:

ANGER: Senator Lieberman, many health-care workers are paid so little that they cannot afford insurance for their own families. How can you address this problem without adding to the already-steep cost of health care?

LIEBERMAN: Yes, I'll tell you one way we could do it -- and I want to respond to Howard Dean's outrageous statement on middle-class tax cuts -- that is to protect the middle-class tax cuts that he wants to repeal and that a lot of us Democrats fought for in Congress over the last three years.

I don't know which is worse, that he wants to repeal the tax cuts, or that he won't admit that they ever existed.

You ask the average middle-class person -- here in Iowa, average family of four saved $1,800 a year under those tax cuts. They need that money to help pay for their insurance. ...

I know what you're thinking: "Anger" is the coolest last name ever. And you're right. But what about Lieberman's response?

I suspect that they're both correct. It's quite possible that 60% of "us" (I doubt Dean is one of them) got a $304 tax cut. And it's probably true that the average Iowa family of four saved $1,800. But you can't represent any sufficiently complex policy decision with a single number like this. The question is: do most people have the time or the inclination to research what's really going on? I doubt it.

Posted by cradle at January 4, 2004 11:07 PM