Alleged Gonzales Lie

Matthew Yglesias gives a slightly unclear explanation of Waxman's latest memo.

On page 51 of the Senate intelligence committee's Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq, we read the following:

In a response to questions form Committee staff, the White House said that on September 24, 2002, NSC staff contacted the CIA to clear another statement for use by the President. The statement said, "we also have intelligence that Iraq has sought large amounts of uranium and uranium oxide, known as yellowcake, from Africa. Yellowcake is an essential ingredient of the process to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons." The CIA cleared the language, but suggested that "of the process" be changed to "in the process." The President did not use the cleared language publicly.

According to Waxman, the White House statement was false; the CIA refused to clear the language. The false statement appeared a letter written in reponse to a request for information that the intelligence committee sent to Condoleezza Rice. The writer of the letter was Alberto Gonzales, who was White House Counsel at the time.

Waxman tells us that Gonzales also claimed, falsely, that the CIA had cleared language intended for use in a speech by Bush to the United Nations. (See page 49 of the Intelligence Committee report.)

I don't know whether Gonzales lied or was misled, which is why I include the word "alleged" in the title. If I felt that Gonzales's reputation hung on the distinction, I probably wouldn't use the word "lie" at all without spending some time trying to figure out whether it applied. But as I see it, Gonzales has so thoroughly discredited himself that his reputation can't get any worse.

Taking into account Waxman's corrections to the record, here is the timeline in a nutshell:

• On Sept. 11, 2002, the CIA rejected language saying that Iraq was attempting to obtain yellowcake.
  
• On Sept. 24, 2002, the White House again requested that the CIA approve language stating that Iraq was attempting to obtain yellowcake, and again the CIA rejected the claim.
  
• On Oct. 6, 2002, the White House then included the claim in a draft of the Cincinnati speech (see Intelligence Committee report page 55), and the CIA rejected it again.
  
• On January 27, 2003, the CIA received a draft of the State of the Union message (see page 64), but it is not clear who if anyone at the CIA read it. The next day, Bush delivered the State of the Union message containing the infamous 16 words.

A Case for Employer Mandates

The consensus on the political left seems to be that a single payer health care system is the best approach if you are designing a system from scratch. The alternative, building on the existing system to provide universal coverage, is generally seen as somewhat inferior from a policy point of view, but much more politically feasible because you can transition to it without forcing people to give up their existing coverage.

I was therefore interested to see a 1989 paper by Lawrence Summers, who is slated to head Obama's White House National Economic Council, that takes a somewhat different point of view. The paper discusses mandated benefits in general (it is not limited to health care), and makes the case that mandating benefits is more efficient than having the government provide the same benefits out of tax dollars. It also lists some downsides to the use of mandates. Summers' basic concern is to argue that economists should pay more attention to the differences between mandated benefits and benefits provided directly by the government, and therefore he doesn't deal with the question of when the benefits of mandates outweigh the drawbacks. It is interesting to see that there are arguments for mandates (as opposed to single payer) that don't depend on political considerations or transition costs. The complete paper (in PDF format) can be found here.

I suppose I should give a hat tip to Pjeman Yousefzadeh at redstate.com, although his posting is stupid on many levels, one being that he misreads Summers' paper so badly that I suspect he didn't actually read it at all.

Big Government Ahead?

David Brooks is about eight years too late with his column titled Big Government Ahead. Government spending has grown faster under Bush than anything we've seen in recent memory. For some reason Brooks counts tax cuts as spending, which would make Bush's record look even worse.

So what will happen to government spending going forward? If McCain is elected, he has talked about controlling spending, but I don't know how serious he is about that. McCain is willing to tell blatant lies in order to win this election, so it's not clear we can believe him when he talks about what he will do if he is elected. His talk about cutting earmarks is not a serious approach to controlling the budget, because earmarks are generally for small amounts of money. More recently, McCain has proposed freezing most of the budget for one year. That is a more serious suggestion, but it would face strong opposition in Congress. Freezing spending on programs such as unemployment insurance, which normally cost more during a recession, is both bad economics and bad politics.

Now let's suppose that Obama wins. When Obama states that he has explained how he will pay for all his proposals, he is describing something similar to "pay-go", the Congressional budgetting discipline which requires spending and tax cut proposals to include matching tax increases or spending cuts. Obama compares his spending proposals to a baseline which assumes that the Bush tax cuts are permanent. In contrast, the pay-go rules use a baseline in which the tax cuts expire. (That's because the expiration is current law, passed by a Republican congress and signed into law by Bush.)

What that means is that deficits will continue under an Obama presidency at something like the current level. It's fairly easy for a politician to run up the deficit; it is politically difficult to bring it down. My sense is that, after seeing how quickly Bush was able to wipe out Clinton's legacy of fiscal prudence, Obama isn't interested in spending a lot of political capital to bring down the deficit. On the other hand, Obama is indicating that he doesn't plan large increases, either. That means that the growth in government spending should be significantly slower under Obama than under Bush.

Obama's proposals don't take the current economic downturn into consideration. Depending on how the economy plays out, Obama may see a need for government spending to stimulate the economy. But doing that would involve a one time increase. I feel fairly safe in predicting that if Obama is elected, federal spending will grow more slowly during Obama's first term than it did during Bush's first term.

McCain Advertisement Disses Hillary

McCain's has an advertisement featuring Biden's supposed gaffes. The whole notion that a handful of stupid-sounding comments taken out of context form a sound basis for evaluating a candidate strikes me as silly, but I won't dwell on that because there are a lot of silly political advertisements out there. What I find striking about this one is that one of the supposedly embarrassing clips in one in which Biden says that, "Hillary Clinton is as qualified or more qualified than I am" to be Vice President.

I know that the far right has spent the last 15 years trying to demonize the Clintons, but after watching Clinton's performance in the Democratic primary I don't see how anyone could believe that she's not qualified to be President or Vice President. I've been critical of Clinton at times, but her command of the issues and her ability to lead have never been in doubt. So when McCain releases an advertisement premised on the notion that Clinton is not qualified to be Vice President, I have to wonder what was going through McCain's mind when he approved the ad. Does he really think that Clinton is unqualified? Or is he pretending to think that in order to appeal to the Republican base?

To give McCain the benefit of every possible doubt, I suppose it is possible to interpret McCain as saying that Biden shouldn't say that Clinton is qualified even if she is. But that interpretation leaves McCain saying something that doesn't make any sense. Clinton, like the majority of people who run for President, didn't actually win. What she did accomplish was to demonstrate that gender is not a disqualification for the Presidency. Remember the 3 AM ad? It may or may not have persuaded any voters to vote for Clinton, but the fact that Clinton could run it demonstrated what Clinton had already accomplished. By spending years studying foreign policy issues, and explaining them to the public in ways that the public could understand, Clinton made people understand that she would have an idea of how to deal with the crisis, no matter what it was.

Contrast that to Palin's recent performance. Republicans are pleased that whenever Palin got a question that she couldn't answer during the Vice Presidential debate, she simply ignored the question and talked about something else. Being able to smoothly change the topic is an excellent ability for a hostess to have, but a President who gets a 3 AM phone call can't make the problem go away by talking about how wonderful her five children are. Palin's performance would be feeding every stereotype saying that woman can't lead if it weren't for Hillary Clinton. But because of what Clinton accomplished, it's crystal clear that Palin's problem isn't that she's a woman; it's that she's running for a position that would require her to deal with issues that she's never been interested in.

Given the significance of Clinton's campaign, and the need to bring the Democratic party together after a hard-fought primary campaign, there was every reason for Biden to acknowledge what Clinton had accomplished.

That leaves us with the obvious interpretation of McCain's ad: McCain, whether he believes it or not, is saying that Clinton is not qualified to be Vice President. Given the historical significance of Clinton's campaign, I suspect that there is a bit of misogyny behind that position. If there are any Hillary supporters who are still considering voting for McCain, I hope they see this ad.

Chocolate

I'm not sure what I think about the war on chocolate, which is really about what can be labelled chocolate. But I will point out that the Modesto Bee is wrong when it says that cocoa butter is an ingredient of chocolate. To set the record straight on this most beloved of foods:

To make chocolate, you take cacao beans, ferment them, dry them, roast them, and grind them. The resulting chocolate consists of small pieces of cacao bean suspended in cocoa butter. (The cocoa butter comes out of the beans during the grinding process. Think of this as analogous to making peanut butter, where you grind up peanuts and end up with small bits of peanut suspended in peanut oil.)

If you want to make chocolate candy, you mix the chocolate with other ingredients (typically sugar, powdered milk, additional fat (either cocoa butter or lecithin), and sometimes vanilla). If you want to make cocoa powder, you remove most of the cocoa butter from the chocolate. (It's not possible to remove all of the cocoa butter, but modern equipment can come close.) The result is a powder because it does not contain enough cocoa butter to bind the bits of cacao bean together. The cocoa butter which you removed can be sold to makers of chocolate candy.

In other words, cocoa power and cocoa butter aren't ingredients of chocolate because you make cocoa powder and cocoa butter out of chocolate, rather than the other way around.

Conservatism and Dishonesty

Is dishonesty a core value of modern conservatism? Mark Kleinman calls attention to Ross Douhthat:

1. Professional racist Steve Sailer writes a dishonest, bigoted anti-Obama screed for The American Conservative, in which he grossly misrepresents Obama's Dreams from My Father.

2. Assistant editor Alex Koznetski, having failed to convince his bosses not to print a piece of lying trash, quits The American Conservative in protest.

3. Ross Douthat makes fun of Koznetski:

If you're not at least somewhat conservative, you probably shouldn't go to work for a magazine called, um, The American Conservative. And if you do, you probably shouldn't get all outraged and resign in protest when they turned out to be, um, conservative.

So telling racist lies is a natural and expected part of being, "um, conservative"? (Douthat doesn't challenge Konetski's careful account of the falsehood of Sailer's review, or Sailer's own solidly racist credentials as a contributor to the VDare website.)

Douthat is not alone. Via The Cheerful Iconoclast, we get a link to Steve Sailer's response to Konetski, and Sailor quotes James Antle writing on the American Spectator blog:

This kind of groundbreaking investigative reporting is why I read the Washington Monthly. I confess: When I went to work for the American Conservative, I was shocked to discover it was a conservative magazine. Then I came to The American Spectator and quickly learned that by some strange coincidence, it too was a conservative magazine!

Douthat makes it very clear that, for him, conservativism implies dishonesty. James Antle's writing is slightly more ambiguous, but if he's not saying that conservativism implies dishonesty, it's not clear what his point is. Koznetski was willing to work for a magazine that espoused conservative opinions, but not one that lied to its readers.

It's hard for an outsider to tell whether dishonesty is a core value of modern conservatism, but when Douthat, a former intern at the National Review, or Antle, who works for the conservative magazine The American Spectator, say it is, that has to carry some weight.

Supply-side Economics

Bruce Bartlett's April 6 Op-Ed piece has generated a lot of discussion which Brad DeLong quotes. Krugman says that Bartlett is misrepresenting the Keynesian position in the 1970's, but I haven't seen any discussion of the rest of Bartlett's historical claims.

I think Bartlett is misrembering (or misrepresenting) some of the history. Rather than pit my memory against his, I'll post some excerpts from an April 13, 1980 New York Times article by Steven Rattner (page F1):

From the start of the 1980 campaign, he [Ronald Reagan] has added to his standard anti-Government stance a new brand of Republican theory known to most as "supply-side economics."

That view has been represented to Mr. Reagan principally by Representative Jack Kemp of Buffalo and Jude Wanniski, a New Jersey economic consultant. It holds that taxes are now so high that a cut will generate a new upsurge of economic activity that will produce more revenues for the Federal Government than were lost by the original cut. The theory is set out in the Laffer Curve, named after Arthur Laffer, an economics professor at the University of Southern California and sometime advisor to the Reagan campaign.

Bartlett writes that the original supply-siders that tax cuts might increase revenue "under very special circumstances." But the question was whether cutting taxes in 1980 would increase revenue, and supply siders--or at least the ones getting the attention Ronald Reagan and the press--are reported as saying it would.

Continuing directly:

The Kemp-Wanniski group has also been promoting the notion of returning to the gold standard, under which dollar bills could once again be turned in for gold.

Bartlett claims that the supply-siders supported "tight money to stop inflation," which seems misleading to me. A gold standard can result in tight money, but "tight money to stop inflation" sounds like a reference to Volker's policy rather than a call for a gold standard. Continuing:

Both of these concepts are in conflict with the more traditional Republican conservatism, which has emphasized, as the first fiscal priority, reducing the size of Government and the size of Government spending. In addition, that camp has voiced little interest in the gold standard as a solution to the nation's economic ills.

The article goes on to list advocates of "traditional" view associated with the Reagan campaign, and says that there is some uncertainty about where Reagan stands on economic policy because his advisors have differing views.

To all appearances, the supply-side group has thus far remained the more influential.

Although he has stressed the need for a balanced budget, Mr. Reagan has also argued in favor of the 30 percent, three-year tax cut proposed in a bill bearing the names of Mr. Kemp and Senator William V. Roth Jr. of Delaware.

Particularly, Mr. Reagan favors the notion that such a cut would lead to an increase in Federal revenues, because of the new economic activity.

Other Republicans have found that this tenet has not been persuasive. After first backing a Kemp-Roth bill that included only the tax cut, Republicans Congressional leaders have now reverted to the more traditional party view, that the first priority was spending cuts, which in turn would allow tax reductions. A revised Kemp-Roth bill now embodies this idea.

Bruce Bartlett tells us that the writers of the Kemp-Roth bill expected it to lose revenue all along.

Bartlett complains that asserting that lower taxes result in higher revenues is "a simplification of what supply side economics is all about," but if so it's a simplification that's appeared in political discussions since supply side economics first appeared.

UPDATE: An anonymous commentator on Mankiw's blog summarized it nicely:

The point seems to be that if you broaden the "supply side" theory to be the elements that have persevered (and are often in common with other theory), then people today are supply-siders. The flipside is that if you pigeon-hole Keynesian economics into just what Keynesians thought in the 1970s, then people today aren't Keynesians. Thus his conclusion is drawn through generalization and oversimplification.

The parts of supply side economics that the supply siders were selling to the Reagan campaign, namely that the tax cuts would pay for themselves and that the U.S. dollar should be convertable to gold, appeared dubious at the time and don't look any better in retrospect.