Jul 9 2009, 4:32PM
Is Obama Manipulating the Recovery Spending?
I have no idea, but if I were trying to answer the question I wouldn't ask USA Today. This article by Brad Heath is really one of the silier pieces of journalism I've read recently. The headline -- "Billions in aid go to areas that backed Obama in '08" -- certainly suggests political manipulation. But that headline could just as easily read, I dunno,
"Billions in aid go to areas that backed McCain in '08"
or
"Billions in aid go to wealthy Americans"
or
"Billions in aid go to white Americans"
or pretty much anything. You'd have just as much tantalizing suggestiveness, and just as little factual content.
And about that factual content: The Heath piece basically says (1) counties that voted for Obama get more money than counties that voted for McCain; (2) pretty much all of this money "has followed a well-worn path ... guided by formulas that have been in place for decades and leave little room for manipulation." There is no theory presented for how the spending could have been manipulated.
The article concludes by noting that "From 2005 through 2007, the counties that later voted for Obama collected about 50% more government aid than those that supported McCain, according to spending reports from the U.S. Census Bureau." Yikes! Either that completely destroys the premise of the article, or this pro-Obama conspiracy runs far deeper than even USA Today can imagine...
OK! Whew. Out of Twitter.
I agree that the article is poorly conceived. But the idea that patterns of government redistribution tend to favor the constituents of the party in power is pretty much a theorem of political science.
Because any sane fiscal stimulus will target poorer people (because they are most likely to consume rather than save the next dollar), a Republican-led stimulus also would have disproportionately benefited Democratic-voting counties, since poorer people do tend to strongly favor Democrats.
The pertinent question is whether poorer people are getting more, the same, or less in transfers from a Democratic stimulus package than they would have gotten from a Republican stimulus package. A Republican stimulus would likely have focused much more heavily on cutting payroll taxes. This would arguably have been better for the poor, by both increasing post-tax wages and reducing unemployment, but this isn't as targeted as increases in welfare and unemployment benefits -- which are predictably larger in Democratic stimulus packages -- and the employment effects of a payroll tax cut won't show up as a transfer.
I swear I remember Paul Krugman flipping his lid semi-daily over the distributive effects of Bush's policies. That poorer Democrat-voting districts would get more in transfers than they would have under a Republican government, thereby bringing down inequality, was a large part of the point of achieving a thoroughly Democratic government. I think you're right that the article does not really establish what it implies, which would require comparison to the Republican counterfactual, but what it implies is almost certainly true. If it isn't, and Obama failed to get more for districts with high concentrations of poor voters than these districts would have gotten under McCain -- even with the blank check of a big stimulus during a perceived economic crisis -- then he may be the most ineffectual Democratic president ever, and progressives ought to be pissed.
I agree with both of you. If i had the time, I would create a blog dedicated exclusively to exposing criticisms of this nature. Too often journalists, bloggers, commenters, politicians, whoever see something happening that can be both condemned as wrong and be used to further their political agenda, point, whatever. It reminds me of a discussion I had recently with a friend about Governor Sanford, whom she was declaring should resign. I asked (because I know she didn't) if she had felt the same way about Clinton. She then tried to justify her claim with semantics. If we could somehow figure out how to remove the hypocrisy from political discussions, or at least display the hypocrisy, our political system might actually be able to get something done.
Let me be clear, this extends to both parties. It is more prevalent in neither circle. Not everyone does it, but enough do, and it is (in my mind) one of the biggest problems in politics. People's memories don't extend far enough to call foul, unfortunately.
Uh... wouldn't Democratic-voting counties generally be far more populous than Republican-voting counties, given Democratic dominance in high- density areas and Republican dominance in low-density ones? Therefore it makes sense that those areas would get more money, given that they are serving more people.
The sort of analysis in the USA Today article is bloody useless. Try looking instead at whether Democratic areas got more money PER CAPITA than Republican ones.
Nola Dawg,
Let me guess, you consider a matter of mere semantics that Gov. Sanford abandoned his job, telling no one where he was and leaving his office to lie about his being on the Appalachian Trail, whereas no one knew about Clinton's affair until Ken Starr dug it up. You don't see the difference in whether the affair affected job performance as relevant to whether someone ought to resign?
Oops -- looks like the USA Today piece did indeed measure on a per capita basis ("the 872 counties that supported Obama received about $69 per person, on average. The 2,234 that supported McCain received about $34"). Perhaps that should be noted in the blog post, as "counties that voted for Obama get more money than counties that voted for McCain" makes it sound like a measurement based simply on total money given to the county, not a per capita one.
My point is, for the majority of people, the first argument is rarely this specific. It's usually "He cheated, bad person, resign." I'm not grouping you into that category specifically, because I have no experience with you in these situations. The justification for the differences only come later, and they tend to magnify what happened in that particular situation to "prove" their point, when in reality if the exact same set of circumstances were to occur to the the opposite party, at the very least the same people would not be so outspoken in defending against or calling for resignations. There were certainly differences in each situation, but neither differed enough in the substance of the events to justify clamoring for resignation vs vehemently defending against resignation.
As a note, "mere semantics" is probably a bit more pejorative than I meant it to be, so for that I apologize. But I still think my point applies to a large majority of the US.