Kevin Drum

That Story You Knew Was Bullshit? Yeah, It Was Bullshit.

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| Fri May. 31, 2013 9:25 AM PDT

If you have a life, you may have missed Wednesday's blockbuster Daily Caller story about IRS commissioner Doug Shulman's 157 visits to the Obama White House. The number of White House visits over the past four years, the Caller reported breathlessly, "strongly suggests coordination by White House officials in the campaign against the president’s political opponents."

You may have noticed that I didn't bother blogging about this in real time. I was too busy trying to decide whether to slit my wrists or jump off a tall building, so I didn't have time. The story was obvious bullshit,1 of the kind the Caller specializes in, but who's got the time to figure out exactly how and why it's bullshit? And who was going to volunteer to spend a day of their lives they'd never get back debunking it?

Well, the answer turns out to be Garance Franke-Ruta. And the explanation for all those entries in the White House log, roughly speaking, is (a) the fact that Shulman was cleared for a meeting doesn't mean he actually attended a meeting, (b) nearly all of Shulman's meetings were related to a biweekly group working on healthcare reform, and (c) virtually all of the meetings took place in buildings other than the White House.

Is it worth clicking the link and reading the details? On the one hand, no, of course not. Are you serious? On the other hand, Franke-Ruta deserves to have her heroic efforts get some love. It's your call.

1I am, needless to say, using this word in its technically correct sense. But you knew that already, didn't you?

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Hands, Ears, Brain Dominance, and Cell Phone Use

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| Fri May. 31, 2013 8:36 AM PDT

Austin Frakt, who apparently has a better memory for my blog than I do, emails today to draw my attention to a new study, "Hemispheric Dominance and Cell Phone Use," which is designed to figure out which ear we use when we're talking on cell phones. I was hoping this study would confirm that we left-eared folks are more charming and intelligent than the rest of you lot who use your right ears, but no such luck. In fact, the authors didn't really conclude much of anything. They found that 68 percent of right-handed people use their right ear and 72 percent of left-handed people use their left ear.

And, um, that was about it. As you probably know, right-handed people generally use the left side of their brains for language processing, and vice-versa for lefties. [Nope. See update below.] So the researchers wanted to find out if auditory hemispheric dominance (AHD) matched up with language hemispheric dominance (LHD). It doesn't: "Our study suggests that AHD may differ from LHD owing to the difference in handedness and cell phone ear use."

Alternatively, most people don't really care much which ear they use, and lefties use their left ear because they're more comfortable holding their phones in the left hands. Ditto in reverse for righties. All in all, I have to say that this study doesn't really tell us much, but I figured it was worth a follow-up. Original discussion here.

UPDATE: A meddling neuroscientist emails to tell me I'm a victim of old wives tales. Most people, including most lefties, process language on the left side of their brains. Right-brain language processing is a little more common among lefties, but it's still a small minority.

Chart of the Day: Don't Get Your Knee Replaced on Friday

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| Fri May. 31, 2013 7:51 AM PDT

Via Andrew Sullivan, the chart on the right shows the relative odds of dying after elective surgery depending on the day of the week the surgery was done. Apparently doctors and staff are bright-eyed and bushy-tailed on Monday, but not so much on Friday. Or maybe it has to do with staffing levels. The authors conclude that it's all very mysterious: "The reasons behind this remain unknown, but we know that serious complications are more likely to occur within the first 48 hours after an operation, and a failure to rescue the patient could be due to well known issues relating to reduced and/or locum staffing (expressed as number and level of experience) and poorer availability of services over a weekend."

Anyway, this is just England. There's nothing to worry about here in America, I'm sure. All the same, maybe you want to schedule your next knee replacement for a nice lazy Tuesday, eh?

Quote of the Day: Cars Are Not Required to Have Drivers

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| Thu May. 30, 2013 10:05 PM PDT

From the New York Times, after telling us that California, Nevada, and Florida have legalized driverless cars:

They are not explicitly illegal in other states, because there is no law that says cars must have drivers.

This is just as the founders envisioned it. After all, they didn't require that horses have riders, did they?

Debt Doesn't Cause Low Growth. Low Growth Causes Low Growth.

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| Thu May. 30, 2013 2:45 PM PDT

Our story so far: Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff have been telling us for the past few years that high levels of government debt are bad for future growth. But is that true? There's certainly a correlation between debt and growth, but is there causation? Or is there some third factor that causes both high debt and low growth?

There's already some evidence from UMass economist Arindrajit Dube that R&R get the causality backward: It's not that high debt causes low growth, but that low growth causes high debt. Today, Miles Kimball and Yichuan Wang of the University of Michigan take a closer look at this and try to tease out what's causing what. To start with, using R&R's dataset, they plot past growth rates vs. present debt for various time periods. This allows them to produce a formula that predicts debt levels based on past growth. Then they plot actual debt vs. predicted debt. The regression line running through the middle of the data tells us the average level of national debt you'd expect based on past growth rates:

Obviously some countries have higher debt than you'd expect based on their past growth, and some have lower debt. So the next question is: Do countries with higher than expected debt levels at a particular point in time have lower future growth than countries with lower than expected debt? If debt truly has an independent effect on growth, you'd certainly think so.

But it turns out this isn't the case. Not even slightly. Debt simply doesn't matter. Basically, low growth in the past predicts low growth in the future. That's all there is to it. However, low growth in the past also predicts high debt, which can fool you into thinking it's the debt that's causing low growth in the future. But it's not.

Now, Kimball and Wang are still no fans of high debt. If your debt is high compared to other countries, the bond markets will probably punish you. What's more, "the big problem with debt is that the only ways to avoid paying it back or paying interest on it forever are national bankruptcy or hyper-inflation. And unless the borrowed money is spent in ways that foster economic growth in a big way, paying it back or paying interest on it forever will mean future pain in the form of higher taxes or lower spending." It's possible, of course, to spend money in ways that foster economic growth, but they believe that most conventional stimulus spending isn't spent that way and therefore isn't very useful.

Nonetheless, it isn't harmful either. "Our bottom line from this analysis, and the thinking we have been able to articulate above, is this: Done carefully, debt is not damning. Debt is just debt."

Our Military Intervention Record in the Middle East Is "Dismal"

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| Thu May. 30, 2013 12:01 PM PDT

John McCain went to Syria recently and, among other things, apparently ended up posing for a photograph with rebels who had kidnapped 11 Lebanese Shiite pilgrims. I think Joe Klein draws the right conclusion:

I don’t blame McCain for this. It’s hard to advance a trip into rebel territory....The point is: We just don’t know these places well enough to go over and draw grand conclusions about policy. In a way, McCain’s trip is a perfect metaphor for the problem of involving ourselves with the Syrian rebels. We may be siding with the greater evil. We may be throwing fuel on a fire that could consume the region. Our track record when it comes to such things is dismal.

Obviously McCain didn't do this deliberately. But he's been insisting for years that we can tell the good guys from the bad guys in Syria, and this incident suggests that we can't. Not reliably, anyway. Even McCain can't. As Klein says, our track record on this stuff is pretty dismal. President Obama is right to be very, very cautious about committing American military aid to this fight.

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Math Is Hard? No, Reading Is Hard

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| Thu May. 30, 2013 10:44 AM PDT

If you've read the several dozen posts I've written about NAEP test scores over the years, you already know about one thing that stands out: scores on math tests have improved a lot more than scores on reading tests. Despite (or because of?) the endless math wars of the past few decades, the evidence suggests that we're doing a better job of teaching math than we used to. Quite a bit better, in fact.1

But why? Motoko Rich asks the experts and gets the following answers:

Teachers and administrators who work with children from low-income families say one reason teachers struggle to help these students improve reading comprehension is that deficits start at such a young age: in the 1980s, the psychologists Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley found that by the time they are 4 years old, children from poor families have heard 32 million fewer words than children with professional parents.

...Reading also requires background knowledge of cultural, historical and social references. Math is a more universal language of equations and rules. “Math is really culturally neutral in so many ways,” said Scott Shirey, executive director of KIPP Delta Public Schools in Arkansas.

....And while reading has been the subject of fierce pedagogical battles, “the ideological divisions are not as great on the math side as they are on the literacy side,” said Linda Chen, deputy chief academic officer in the Boston Public Schools.

I'd argue about that third bullet. The "ideological divisions" over math teaching have actually been pretty damn impressive for the past few decades, though it's possible that they've calmed down lately.

The other two bullets sound more plausible, though. Low SES kids start out with a big reading deficit as early as kindergarten, and it's hard to make up that deficit later on. The deficit in math is probably small or zero. I'm a little less sure about possible cultural issues, but that might be part of it too. And if I were speculating, I'd suggest that because language is more hardwired into the brain than math, it might just be a tougher nut to crack.

In any case, I just wanted to pass this along. There are a few topics that mainstream news organizations rarely mention—for example, the fact that test scores are up, not down, over the past few decades—and the math/reading dichotomy is one of them. It's nice to see it at least get a mention.

1Up through 8th grade, anyway. Beyond that, test scores have been fairly flat in both reading and math.

Tax Expenditures Favor the Rich—But Probably by Less Than CBO Says

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| Thu May. 30, 2013 9:04 AM PDT

The Congressional Budget Office has a new report out that tries to figure out who benefits the most from tax expenditures. This includes things like the exclusion of healthcare from income tax, the charitable deduction, the EITC, and so forth: money that's essentially an expenditure, but is distributed via tax credits and deductions instead of by mailing checks to people. What the CBO finds is that the biggest beneficiaries are the poor and the rich:

As it turns out, I have a couple of problems with this analysis. First, it includes the preferential tax rate on dividends and capital gains as a tax expenditure, one that obviously benefits the wealthy disproportionately. But I'm not sure that's fair. Whatever you think of the preferential tax rate on investment income, it doesn't really strike me as a tax expenditure. I suppose this gets us into angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin territory, since you could argue that low cap gains rates are a subsidy for investment that's distributed through the tax code, but that seems sort of tendentious to me.

My other problem is with the three big tax deductions they study: mortgage interest, charitable contributions, and state/local taxes. These also disproportionately favor the wealthy. But for the non-wealthy, the tax code allows a benefit for these things in the form of the standard deduction. So if we're going to make comparisons, don't we need to tot up the benefit of the standard deduction for various income groups?

Even if you account for these things, the wealthy probably benefit more from tax expenditures than the middle class. And there are good reasons to think that capital gains rates should be less preferential than they are, regardless of whether or not they count as tax expenditures. Still, done properly, I suspect the chart above would be a lot flatter than it looks.

The Public Wants a Special Prosecutor to Investigate the IRS

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| Thu May. 30, 2013 7:37 AM PDT

A recent Quinnipiac poll suggests that the public isn't too concerned about either Benghazi or the subpoena of AP phone records. But they are concerned about the IRS scandal. Ed Kilgore highlights a disturbing piece of this:

The most startling finding from the Q-poll is that 76% of respondents—including 63% of Democrats and 88% of Republicans—favor the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate the IRS allegations. This may simply reflect the fact that many people don't know who to trust as the "scandal" drags on, and/or that partisans assume the "other side" has too much control over the investigations. But these are some formidable numbers for a course of action that most liberal elites—and a growing number of conservative elites—deplore as threatening a nightmarish return to the 1990s at their worst.

My guess is that most people simply don't understand the implications. "Special prosecutor" sounds pretty benign, after all. They just aren't aware that, in practice, they mostly turn into obsessive, Ahab-like trawlers through every nook and cranny of the federal government.

It sure seems like there ought to be some way to keep them more focused, though. Obviously that didn't work with Ken Starr, but why can't a special prosecutor be appointed jointly by House, Senate, and president, with a limited mandate and a clear timeframe? Say, one year or so. And an agreement that the mandate can't be changed unless all three agree to it. It seems like that ought to be doable. So why isn't it?

Obama to Nominate Comey as Head of FBI

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| Wed May. 29, 2013 5:04 PM PDT

The Washington Post is reporting that President Obama plans to nominate James Comey, the former Bush deputy attorney general who became famous for declining to certify the legality of the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program, to become head of the FBI:

The White House had narrowed the search in recent days to Comey and Lisa Monaco, a former assistant attorney general for national security who became Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser earlier this year.

Law enforcement and administration officials said the White House was concerned that Monaco’s confirmation process would run into obstacles in Congress. Comey’s nomination, on the other hand, was described by some officials as a symbol of bipartisanship.

Of course. Because everyone knows that nominating a Democrat to run the FBI would be an intolerable provocation.

I sure hope this reporting is wrong. Nominating Comey because he thinks he's the best person for the job is one thing. But if Obama thinks that nominating Comey will be seen as some kind of bipartisan olive branch, he's crazy.