The Ostrich Administration: Apres Bush le Deluge

Paul Krugman writes:

The Vanishing Future: [W]e've had six years to grow accustomed to Bush budget chicanery... the sheer childishness of the administration's denials and deceptions.... [I]n 2001... Bush... insisted that its tax-cut plans wouldn't endanger the budget surplus.... [T]he Senate demanded a cap on the tax cut.... The administration met this requirement... by "sunsetting" the tax cut, making the whole thing expire at the end of 2010.

This was obviously silly... the law as written... no federal tax on the estates of wealthy people who die in 2010... estate tax will return in 2011.... I suggested, back in 2001, that the legislation be renamed the Throw Momma From the Train Act.

It was also obvious that the administration... would try to eliminate the sunset clause and make the tax cuts permanent. But it quickly became clear that the budget forecasts... were wildly overoptimistic.... Making the tax cut permanent would greatly worsen those future deficits. What were budget officials to do? You almost have to admire their brazenness: they made the future disappear. Clinton-era budgets offered 10-year projections of spending and revenues. But the Bush administration slashed the budget horizon to five years... since budget analyses no longer covered the years after 2010, the revenue losses from extending the tax cut became invisible.

But now it's 2006, and even a five-year projection covers the period from 2007 to 2011, which means including a year in which making the Bush tax cuts permanent will cost a lot of revenue -- $119.7 billion... a standard table titled "Impact of Budget Policy"... this year, that table is missing....

The administration has no idea how to make its tax cuts feasible in the long run. Yet it has never, as far as I can tell, allowed unfavorable facts to affect its determination... it has devoted all its efforts to hiding those awkward facts from public view. (Any resemblance to, say, its Iraq strategy is no coincidence.)

At this point the administration's budget strategy seems to be simply to ignore reality. The 2007 budget makes it clear, once and for all, that the tax cuts can't be offset with spending cuts. But Bush officials have decided to ignore that unpleasant fact, and let some future administration deal with the mess they have created.

Comments

[Howard]

ignoring reality isn't just the bush administration's budget strategy....

[Dale]

If I ever see Paul again, I'll buy him a drink and thank him for trying. It's too bad that so many Americans seem immune to outrage and disgust over this administrations radical, reckless and incompetent policies and personel.

[Bruce Webb]

Speaking of vanishing, the HTML versions of the Social Security Reports from 1997 to 2000 on the official ssa.gov site got taken down and replaced by PDFs. No more deep linking to the tables and figures for those years. Since I doubt the federal government has a serious lack of server space you can only conclude that someone got embarrassed. For me this means about a hundred links on my web-site just got broken. For the country it means that we are this much closer to an Orwellian Ministry of Truth.

Figure II.D7 for 1998? Used to be a click away. Now? But the numbers didn't vanish. Hopefully these reports are mirrored somewhere on the net. This clumsy attempt to suppress the data will not stand.

[anne]

To keep links to important documents fresh I suggest using "Furl" for storage. The service offers ample free storage, and is fast, and offers an efficient search though not of Google quality.

[bakho]

CBO migrated their historical data to pdf format as well. The next step is probably to make the pdf format available for free and privatize the HTML data so a private corporation can make a buck selling it? I am complaining to my Congressman. The people's data should be accessable to the people.

[bakho]

CBO also has an online survey. Perhaps if enough people request it through the survey, they will make the historical data available in HTML again. I still think asking your Congressman about preserving data in usable form is worthwhile. Digital archiving is a huge issue.

[Miracle Max]

I've got the HTML pages from ssa.gov. Remind me over the weekend and I'll try and scare them up.

[Rob]

"At this point the administration's budget strategy seems to be simply to ignore reality."

No, their strategy is not merely to ignore, but rather to affirmatively obfuscate the real problem until a democrat gets elected, and then scream bloody murder about the mess the budget's in. Clever bastards. It's probably going to work, too.

[Big Al]

As Sam Goldwyn said:- "I've made up my mind, don't confuse me with facts",

[Bruce Webb]

Thanks for the tips. But in point of fact we are not talking migration, the Reports were always available as PDFs and I have multiple copies on this hard drive and that. But a PDF is a pretty clumsy way to present a 200 page plus Report, particularly when the PDF page number does not correspond with the Report page number.

Interestingly the 1995 and 1996 Reports are still available in HTML, perhaps awaiting their own conversion. But they lack the level of internal links that the 1997 to 2000 Reports did, and moreover their numbers immediately precede the rapid improvement in Trust Fund health that took off in 1997.

But while it is important and valuable to see the changes made after 2000 in methodology and number manipulation, the real damage to privatizers is sitting in plain view in the productivity numbers of the 2005 Report. They projected 2.0% for 2005, they got 2.7% and that only because Q4 flatlined. And they just don't have .7 points to carve out. 2005 Intermediate Cost called for 2.0% in 2006, 1.8% in 2007 and 1.7% in 2010 enroute to ultimate 1.6% in 2013. Where do you cut? 2005 Low Cost (fully funded) calls for 2.2% for 2006, 2.1% for 2009, 2.0% for 2010, enroute for ultimate 1.9% in 2012.

Due to the effects of compounding (higher economic baseline) compensating for that extra .7 points means carving more than .7 points out of those future years. I can't believe they would dare to revise the already weak 2006 number down and put Intermediate Cost under 2.0%, but they only have a total of .9 points to play with. As it looks right now the arithmetic would show something like 2.0% 2006, 1.8% 2007 and ultimate 1.6% by 2008. Carving .7 points off of Low Cost and leaving 2006 at 2.2% gives you 2.0% 2007 and ultimate 1.9% by 2010. 2005 Report Table V.B1. (p.87)

The math is crude but broadly reflects the task the Trustees are faced with. I could pile on and point out that Intermediate Cost called for 5.4% unemployment for 2005 and Low Cost 5.3%, but why pile on. 2005 Report Table V.B2 (p.93)

[anne]

"Furl" will easily allow you to keep the HTML links and documents with all the connecting links indefinitely.

[dubblblind]

"No, their strategy is not merely to ignore, but rather to affirmatively obfuscate the real problem..."

A head in the sand connotes an attempt to avoid seeing what's going on and as such mischaracterizes what the Rethugs are up to. They know *exactly* what they are up to, and it is closer to the truth to say that they are trying to force everyone elses head in the sand, as Rob points out. This is about a shameless money grab of, by and for the rich regardless of the consequences. Perhaps a more suitable header would have been "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!"

[liberal]

I don't think the HTML==>PDF thing is any kind of plot. I think it just shows bad taste.

[Deviltom]

"Perhaps a more suitable header would have been 'Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!'"

More like, "Damn the torpedoes, icebergs, submerged rocks, hurricane winds, broken engine, and rioting crew members; bring me my drink!"

[jayackroyd]

why oh why are we governed by incompetent fools, Iraq edition.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/09/AR2006020902418_2.html

CIA analyst rips administration's intelligence fabrication, including today's jaw dropping little detail:

(T)he first request ... received from a Bush policymaker for an assessment of post-invasion Iraq was "not until a year into the war."

[William Davis]

It's all about how they define their jobs.

These guys believe that they work for Bush and not the country. If they keep Bush in power, they've done their work. Everything else is something for the next guy to worry about.

So, the idea that this will screw the country in ten years isn't worrisome. It's irrelevant.

This also seems to be an attitude prevalent in many corporate cultures. Make the profit today, make sure you've got a golden parachute and leave any fallout for the next management team.

[Jonathan W. King]

Bruce Webb writes:
> Figure II.D7 for 1998? Used to be a click away. Now?
> But the numbers didn't vanish. Hopefully these
> reports are mirrored somewhere on the net. This
> clumsy attempt to suppress the data will not stand.

Another plan should be obvious. Because the US government can't copyright anything of their own, there's literally nothing stopping you (or you and some volunteers) from doing some simple copy/pasting from the PDF to a (say) PNG of the critical tables; Apple's preview and Adobe Acrobat can also do an okay job of copy/pasting text as well. Yes, it's a pain, and a PNG isn't quite as good as an (uggh) HTML formatted table, but it's something they can't stop you from doing if they tried.

[th]

This is how you starve the enemy before you drag him upstairs to the bathtub. I am sure Grover Norquist cannot believe his lucky stars.

[Charles]

Dale, the reckoning is coming. Reckonings have a habit of getting people's attention.

The only question is the date. The winner of that pool makes a very large amount of money in the aftermath.

[John]

Please note the irony of disregarding more than 5 years into the future for tax and budget purposes while insisting that a 75 year projection for Social Security is absolutely believable.

John

[Bruce Webb]

"Because the US government can't copyright anything of their own, there's literally nothing stopping you (or you and some volunteers) from doing some simple copy/pasting from the PDF to a (say) PNG of the critical tables;"

Nothing but laziness and ineptitude and I have an abundance of both.

At this point it is not worth the effort. The material is out there and I have copies. If I need to I will learn how to extract tables from the PDFs and post them to blogspot. But the real action is in the Reports that are still up, the Bush era reports from 2001 to 2005. The raw manipulation of second year numbers in the 2003 and 2004 Reports, the substitution of Productivity for GDP (which people understood and which is reported in the paper) as lead number in the economic tables, the introduction of the Infinite Horizon so as to justify "tens of trillions of dollars", all of that is work product of the Bush Administration.

But the Report they really need to flush down the Memory Hole is the one that has not yet been published. I believe it is a statutory requirement to publish a Report on the Operations of the Trust Fund by March 31, 2006. I have semi-joked in the past that Christmas day in the Webb household comes in the last week of March, I can barely stand the anticipation. For example I led my post about and links to the 2005 Report thusly:
"Pardon the incoherency, I am running around the room high-fiving myself. But first the numbers:"
http://bruceweb.blogspot.com/2005_03_01_bruceweb_archive.html
Are these the words of a deranged man? Perhaps. But one who can hook you right up with Table V.B1 and Figure II.D7.

(Momma? Why is that man with the laptop thrashing his arms around in the air? Shush honey, that is the Social Security Guy. He is harmless really, just don't say the words 'Trust Fund Ratio' where he can hear them.)