"How can I help it," he blubbered. "How can I help seeing
what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four."
"Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes
they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You
must try harder. It is not easy to become sane."
--George Orwell, "1984"
Orwell's great theme was that political ideology, like religion, can blind its most perfervid adherents to reality. But Americans flatter themselves that they are a pragmatic people, immune to abstract theory. New Englanders pride themselves on "Yankee ingenuity." Missouri calls itself the "Show Me State." My brother and I think the official motto of our native New Jersey ought to be "Oh yeah, who sez?"
So how on earth did we end up with this crackpot Bush budget plan? Exactly one year ago, Newsday's Marie Coco points out, the U.S. budget was showing a $127 billion surplus. President Junior was taking bows for sending $300 "tax refund" checks to us humble groundlings--even though they weren't actually refunds, and Democrats had insisted upon adding them to a scheme mainly benefiting Bush's pals in the luxury skyboxes.
Last week, the administration was forced to admit that the U.S. budget is now $165 billion in the hole, 60 percent worse than it predicted. Budget director Mitch Daniels also distributed a dandy Enron-style chart duly reproduced on the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette front page. It showed deficits morphing magically into surpluses in 2005--that is, after the next presidential election.
For that to happen, Daniels forecast corporate profits rising a preposterous 70 percent, government expenditures shrinking even as the White House presses for sharp increases, and tax revenues rising 25 percent just as the costliest of Bush's save-the-billionaires tax cuts kick in. Oh yeah, and a runaway bull market on Wall Street. There's a better chance of the fun-loving Bush twins,Jenna and Barbara, entering a convent.
How can anybody capable of counting his own fingers act surprised? Almost nine years ago, on August 6, 1993, Bill Clinton won the closest, most crucial political battle of his presidency. Having promised during the campaign to "focus on the economy like a laser," he persuaded Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey to support his then-controversial plan to cut the federal deficit, including marginal, but hardly confiscatory, income tax increases upon the very wealthy.
Kerrey's vote brought the U.S. Senate to a 50-50 tie, enabling Vice President Al Gore to cast the decisive vote. The Clinton plan passed without a single Republican vote amid GOP predictions of disaster. Newt Gingrich said the tax increase would cause "a job killing recession." Rep. Robert Michel of Illinois called it "a silent, greedy destroyer of family budgets, a dreadful virus in the economic bloodstream of our nation."
Instead, the exact opposite happened. Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin summed it all up in the Washington Post on July 19: "Unemployment fell from over 7 percent to 4 percent and was under 5 percent for 40 consecutive months; private investment in productive equipment grew at double-digit rates for eight years; annual productivity growth more than doubled by the end of the period; inflation was low; GDP growth averaged roughly 4 percent per annum, and 20 million new private-sector jobs were created." Budget deficits vanished, surpluses appeared, and prosperity spread.
Apart from the current debacle, it's hard to imagine a more dramatic demonstration that the cherished economic dogmas of the Republican right-wing are simply wrong. During the 2000 campaign, Al Gore warned that Bush's proposed tax cuts--$1.7 trillion, including interest on the national debt--would undermine fiscal discipline and eat into the Social Security and Medicare trust funds.Most of our esteemed Washington press corps treated these warnings as the tedious meanderings of a joyless scold.
Temporarily incapable of adding and subtracting whole numbers, pundits affected not to recognize Bush's bogus statistics. Few noticed that his Social Security privatization scheme counted almost a third of the system's revenues twice--once to "invest" it in private accounts, twice to pay seniors' benefits. Instead, they focused upon Gore's clothing, and made a big deal of his exasperated sighs at Bush's absurd pronouncements.
One lonely dissenter was New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. "Mr. Bush has made an important political discovery," he wrote. "Really big misstatements, it turns out, cannot be effectively challenged, because voters can't believe that a man who seems so likable would do that sort of thing." Indeed, happy throngs of Bush supporters echoed his imbecile taunt of "fuzzy math."
Well, math can't get any fuzzier than the administration's new budget projections, the GOP equivalent of an old-fashioned Stalinist Five Year Plan. Somebody's got to start dealing with reality, and relatively soon. Democratic politicians had better find some courage, because sure it won't be anybody in the ideologically-blinkered Bush administration.
members.shaw.ca
Gene Lyons
July 24, 2002
Fuzzy Math Revisited |
