Cooking the books on Obamacare

Malice or incompetence? Why can't it be both? [Link]

For several months now, whenever the topic of enrollment in the Affordable Care Act came up, I’ve been saying that it was too soon to tell its ultimate effects. We don’t know how many people have paid for their new insurance policies, or how many of those who bought policies were previously uninsured. For that, I said, we will have to wait for Census Bureau data, which offer the best assessment of the insurance status of the whole population. Other surveys are available, but the samples are smaller, so they’re not as good; the census is the gold standard. Unfortunately, as I invariably noted, these data won’t be available until 2015.

I stand corrected: These data won’t be available at all. Ever.

No, I’m not kidding. I wish I was. The New York Times reports that the Barack Obama administration has changed the survey so that we cannot directly compare the numbers on the uninsured over time.

The changes are intended to improve the accuracy of the survey, being conducted this month in interviews with tens of thousands of households around the country. But the new questions are so different that the findings will not be comparable, the officials said.

An internal Census Bureau document said that the new questionnaire included a “total revision to health insurance questions” and, in a test last year, produced lower estimates of the uninsured. Thus, officials said, it will be difficult to say how much of any change is attributable to the Affordable Care Act and how much to the use of a new survey instrument.

“We are expecting much lower numbers just because of the questions and how they are asked,” said Brett J. O’Hara, chief of the health statistics branch at the Census Bureau.

I’m speechless. Shocked. Stunned. Horrified. Befuddled. Aghast, appalled, thunderstruck, perplexed, baffled, bewildered and dumbfounded. It’s not that I am opposed to the changes: Everyone understands that the census reports probably overstate the true number of the uninsured, because the number they report is supposed to be “people who lacked insurance for the entire previous year,” but people tend to answer with their insurance status right now.

But why, dear God, oh, why, would you change it in the one year in the entire history of the republic that it is most important for policy makers, researchers and voters to be able to compare the number of uninsured to those in prior years? The answers would seem to range from “total incompetence on the part of every level of this administration” to something worse.

Yes, that’s right, I said “every level.” Because guess who was involved in this decision, besides the wonks at Census?

The White House is always looking for evidence to show the benefits of the health law, which is an issue in many of this year’s midterm elections. The Department of Health and Human Services and the White House Council of Economic Advisers requested several of the new questions, and the White House Office of Management and Budget approved the new questionnaire. But the decision to make fundamental changes in the survey was driven by technical experts at the Census Bureau, and members of Congress have not focused on it or suggested political motives.

Sarah Kliff of Vox says we shouldn’t freak out, because these are the numbers that the census collects for 2013, so the change is actually giving us a good baseline. But I’m afraid I’m not so sanguine. AsAaron Carroll says: “It’s actually helpful to have a trend to measure, not a pre-post 2013/2014. This still sucks.”

The new numbers will suffer, to some extent, from the same bias that the old questions suffered from: People are better at remembering recent events than later ones. Quick: On what day did you last get your oil changed? What month was the wedding you attended last summer? If it was in the last few months, you probably know. If it was someone you’re not that close to … well, the summer months kind of blend into each other now that you’re a grownup, don’t they?

And what has been happening in the most recent months? A whole lot of change! Policies were canceled, benefits changed, people shifted around their coverage in anticipation of the new law. That doesn’t make for a very good baseline. It will be a very good measure of who has insurance right now, in 2014, but it’s not where I’d want to start my 2013 baseline for our new law. That’s why they should have done this for 2012 -- or waited until 2016 -- to give us actual comparable data for the transition period. So by your leave, I think I’ll continue to freak out for a bit.

I find it completely and totally impossible to believe that this problem didn’t occur to anyone at Census, or in the White House. It would be like arguing that the George W. Bush administration might have inadvertently overlooked the possibility that when the U.S. invaded Iraq, there would be shooting. This is the biggest policy debate of the last 10 years, and these data are at the heart of that debate. It is implausible that everyone involved somehow failed to notice that they were making it much harder to know the effect of this law on the population it was supposed to serve. Especially because the administration seems to have had a ready excuse as soon as people reacted to the news.

Even if the administration genuinely believes this is defensible, why would they give anyone reason to believe that it is cooking the books? Because those charges are being made, and they’re a lot harder to dismiss than the complaints about birth certificates or dark intimations that the administration has simply made up its enrollment figures out of whole cloth.

I just don’t get it.

I mean, I can certainly think of explanations, but I can’t quite bring myself to believe the worst of them. Which leaves me with the only slightly-less-utterly-appalling conclusion: At some point, very early on in the process, folks noticed that asking the new questions would make it difficult to compare Obamacare’s implementation year to prior years, and decided that assessing the effects of the transition wasn’t nearly as important as making urgent changes to … questions we’ve been asking basically the same way for a decade and a half.

No, wait, that doesn’t make any sense, either. Let’s go back to inexplicable, shall we?

If the administration is really serious about transparency and data-driven policy, as I’ve been told for a year now, then it will immediately rectify this appalling mistake and put the old questions back into circulation double-quick. But we’re more likely going to hear the most transparent and data-driven administration in history citing these data -- without an asterisk -- to tout the amazing impact of its policies.

Obamacare not reaching the uninsured

Wasn't that the entire point of this slow motion train wreck? [Link]

ObamaCare isn’t achieving its primary goal of extending coverage to the uninsured, according to a new study.

The survey released Thursday by the McKinsey & Co. consulting firm found that only 27 percent of people who have selected a plan on the new exchanges didn’t previously have coverage.

The Obama administration says 4 million people have selected a plan since the exchanges launched on Oct. 1, but has not said how many of them already had an insurance plan.

At a healthcare industry conference on Thursday, Gary Cohen, a top official at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), said it’s not something the administration has the ability to track.

“That's not a data point that we are really collecting in any sort of systematic way," Cohen said, according to The National Journal.

A CMS official told The Hill that it’s an important measurement that the agency hopes to be able to report on in the future.

“We are a looking at a range of data sources to determine how many marketplace enrollees previously had coverage,” the official said. “The marketplace application asks applicants only if they are looking to apply for coverage, not whether the consumer currently has coverage. Previous insurance coverage is an important metric, and we hope to have additional information in the future.”

Still, the 4 million ObamaCare enrollees are a small fraction of those who may have obtained coverage for the first time. 

The administration said earlier this month that almost 9 million people had signed up for Medicaid since Oct. 1, but it's also unclear there how many of them are newly insured.

A recent analysis by Avalere Health, a Washington-based healthcare consulting firm, estimated that 2.4 million to 3.5 million of the enrollees may be receiving Medicaid.

Figures released by the administration have often painted incomplete picture of the healthcare law's progress. It reported enrollment figures that included people who have selected a plan but not completed the process by making their first premium payment.

 Critics have warned that the administration’s numbers are inflated because not everyone who selects a plan will complete the final step to obtain coverage.

I'm pretty sure that they aren't capturing that information because they don't want to know how bad the enrollments are.

A Lost War

The War on Poverty. [Link]

Now here is something you may not know. Early on ? in the first decade of our 50-year experiment with an expanded welfare state ? carefully controlled experiments funded by the federal government established without question that welfare changes behavior. It leads to the very behavioral changes that keep people in a state of poverty and dependency. Think about that. Any serious social science debate about the effects of welfare on the behavior of the recipients was resolved four decades ago!

We now know a lot about how behavior affects poverty. In fact, if you do these four things, it’s almost impossible to remain poor:

1. Finish high school,

2. Get a job,

3. Get married, and

4. Don’t have children until you get married.

So how does welfare affect behavior? In the late 1960s the federal government sought to find that out in what Charles Murray calls “the most ambitious social science experiment in history.”

The experiments were all conducted by social scientists who believed in the welfare state and had no doubt about its capacity to be successful. In other words, they were confident of the answers before the experiments ever began. Their goal was to prove that popular wisdom was all wrong ? that welfare would not cause people to reduce their work effort, to get married less often, divorce more quickly or engage in other dysfunctional behavior.

The experiments were all controlled. Randomly selected people were assigned to a “control group” and an “experimental group.” The latter received a guaranteed income, and the program even used Milton Friedman’s term for it: a negative income tax. The largest, longest and best-evaluated of these experiments was SIME/DIME (Seattle Income Maintenance Experiment/Denver Income Maintenance Experiment) in Seattle and Denver. And the results were not pretty. To the dismay of the researchers, they largely confirmed what conventional wisdom had thought all along. As I reported in “Privatizing the Welfare State”:

• The number of hours worked dropped 9% for husbands and 20% for wives, relative to the control group. For young male adults it dropped 43% more.
• The length of unemployment increased 27% among husbands and 42% for wives, relative to the control group. For single female heads of households it increased 60% more.
• Divorce increased 36% more among whites and 42% more among blacks. (In a New Jersey experiment, the divorce rate was 84% higher among Hispanics.)

BTW, these results have been studied and studied over and over again and there is a large literature on them ? almost all of it written by researchers who detested the outcomes. Good summaries are provided byCharles Murray and Martin Anderson.

Both authors point out that the results are even worse than they at first appear. For one thing, the “control group” had access to conventional welfare available in the 60s and 70s. So this was by no means a pure (welfare free) control group. Also the enrollees were given different instructions about how long they could expect their guaranteed income to last. It turns out that the longer the guarantee, the worse the negative effects.

So far as I can tell there was no marriage penalty in these experiments ? certainly nothing like we have today ? and little or no penalty for earning a higher income. With the passage of time all these incentives have become increasingly more perverse. For example, over the past 50 years we have added one marriage penalty after another to welfare benefits. There is a very strong marriage penalty in ObamaCare, for example. And even Paul Krugman concedes that the marginal tax rate faced by low-income families is in excess of 80% today. (It actually goes above 100% in many cases.) And ObamaCare will make the penalty for working and earning even higher.

So here is the important public policy question: If it is well established that self-sufficiency is closely related to working and being married why are we “fighting poverty” by doing things that social scientists have known for decades lead to less work and fewer marriages?

Out-of-Touch Extremists

Survey says: Democrats. [Link]

To get a sense of just how out to lunch Democrats are these days, consider:

The economy is barely moving after four years of Obama's "recovery," there are millions who've given up looking for work, household incomes are down and poverty is up.

Not surprisingly, 64% of the public says the country is headed in the wrong direction — 71% of independents say this. But those who identify themselves as Democrats are positively upbeat. Two-thirds, in fact, are perfectly satisfied with the country's direction.

Nor are Democrats willing to entertain any doubts about Obama. Overall, his approval rating is just 40% — just 31% of independents give him a thumbs-up. But a ridiculously high 80% of Democrats like the job Obama's doing.

And while only 42% of independents, and just 15% of Republicans, think Obama is honest and trustworthy — a perfectly reasonable result given his blatant lies about ObamaCare — 93% of Democrats still believe in him.

Even on the obviously botched ObamaCare launch, just 27% of Democrats are willing to say he bungled it, in contrast with 97% of Republicans and 70% of independents.

It's worth noting, too, that on question after question, Republicans and independents are more closely aligned than independents and Democrats. You can see that clearly in the charts above.

It's true that some of these responses simply show Democrats rallying around their guy in the White House. But the fact is that Republicans were more willing to admit to George W. Bush's faults as a leader when they emerged, and own up to a bad economy during his tenure.

How the numbers will be spun

On Obamacare enrollment numbers or when is an enrollment not an enrollment? [Link]

The numbers are coming in — and it’s looking like fewer than 50,000 people have enrolled in the federal exchange and about 100,000 people in the country at large. Whenever official numbers are released, bet on two things. First, as Allahpundit says in the link above:

Fearless prediction: They’re not going to release the demographic data. The only way to make these numbers look more dismal than they are is if it turns out that many, or even most, of the 100,000 who’ve enrolled are older people or people with preexisting conditions.

Second, they are going to count as “enrollees” people who have a plan sitting in their shopping cart, whether it has been purchased or not:

When the Obama administration releases health law enrollment figures later this week, though, it will use a more expansive definition. It will count people who have purchased a plan as well as those who have a plan sitting in their online shopping cart but have not yet paid.
“In the data that will be released this week, ‘enrollment’ will measure people who have filled out an application and selected a qualified health plan in the marketplace,” said an administration official, who requested anonymity to frankly describe the methodology.

I have about ten items sitting in my shopping cart at Amazon right now. They have been moved to a “save for later” category, I guess because I have not bought them and may never buy them. Some of them have been there for months. When I check out with other items, I get little notifications telling me that the price has changed on some of them. I sincerely doubt Amazon counts these items in their sales figures, and if they did, that would be fraud.

A survey about SFF fandom

Interesting survey. [Link]

So there’s this really good conversation going on in Twitter about encouraging Diversity in SFF. The hashtag is #DiversityInSFF and I highly encourage checking it out. Anyway, reading that and thinking about the other conversations, I started wondering who the fans of speculative fiction are? I mean, I know who goes to conventions, but what about everyone else?

So I figured I’d just ask and made a survey.

Pass it around? The more people who fill it out, the better the sample.

Edited to add: I updated some of the questions and added some to address concerns people raised. If you go back to the same link, you can change your response.

The results are here, if you are curious.

If you don't report crime, it doesn't happen

Fudging school crime stats in Miami may have helped cause Trayvon Martin's death. [Link]

Both of Trayvon’s suspensions during his junior year at Krop High involved crimes that could have led to his prosecution as a juvenile offender. However, Chief Charles Hurley of the Miami-Dade School Police Department (MDSPD) in 2010 had implemented a policy that reduced the number of criiminal reports, manipulating statistics to create the appearance of a reduction in crime within the school system. Less than two weeks before Martin’s death, the school systemcommended Chief Hurley for “decreasing school-related juvenile delinquency by an impressive 60 percent for the last six months of 2011.” What was actually happening was that crimes were not being reported as crimes, but instead treated as disciplinary infractions.

In October 2011, after a video surveillance camera caught Martin writing graffiti on a door, MDSPD Office Darryl Dunn searched Martin’s backpack, looking for the marker he had used. Officer Dunn found 12 pieces of women’s jewelry and a man’s watch, along with a flathead screwdriver the officer described as a “burglary tool.” The jewelry and watch, which Martin claimed he had gotten from a friend he refused to name, matched a description of items stolen during the October 2011 burglary of a house on 204th Terrace, about a half-mile from the school. However, because of Chief Hurley’s policy “to lower the arrest rates,” as one MDSPD sergeant said in an internal investigation, the stolen jewerly was instead listed as “found property” and was never reported to Miami-Dade Police who were investigating the burglary. Similarly, in February 2012 when an MDSPD officer caught Martin with a small plastic bag containing marijuana residue, as well as a marijuana pipe, this was not treated as a crime, and instead Martin was suspended from school.

Either of those incidents could have put Trayvon Martin into the custody of the juvenile justice system. However, because of Chief Hurley’s attempt to reduce the school crime statistics —according to sworn testimony, officers were “basically told to lie and falsify” reports — Martin was never arrested. And if he had been arrested, he might never have been in Sanford the night of his fatal encounter with Zimmerman.

In fact, the reason Zimmerman was patrolling the townhouse community the night of the February 2012 shooting was that there had been a rash of burglaries in the neighborhood, although there was no indication that Trayvon Martin was involved in any of those crimes.

As for Chief Hurley’s policy, it was the controversy over Martin’s death that accidentally exposed it. In March 2012, the Miami Herald reported on Martin’s troubled history of disciplinary incidents at Krop High. Chief Hurley then launched the internal affairs investigation in an attempt to find out who had provided information to the reporter. During the course of that investigation, MDSPD officers and supervisors described Chief Hurley’s policy of not reporting crimes by students. Chief Hurley was subsequently accused of sexually harassing two female subordinates. He resigned in February, about a year after Trayvon Martin’s death.

Lying with numbers

The NSA and FBI lie with numbers. [Link]

Every year, the Justice Department gives Congress a tally of the classified wiretap orders sought and issued in terrorist and spy cases – it was 1,789 last year. At the same time, it reports the number of demands for “business records” in such cases, issued under Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act. And while the number of such orders has generally grown over the years, it has always managed to stay relatively low. In 2011, it was 205. There were 96 orders in 2010, and only 21 in 2009.

Thanks to the Guardian’s scoop, we now know definitively just how misleading these numbers are. You see, while the feds are required to disclose the number of orders they apply for and receive (almost always the same number, by the way), they aren’t required to say how many people are targeted in each order. So a single order issued to Verizon Business Solutions in April covered metadata for every phone call made by every customer. That’s from one order out of what will probably be about 200 reported in next year’s numbers.

The public numbers are the one bit of accountability around the surveillance court, and the Justice Department used them to misdirect the public away from a massive domestic NSA spying operation that, as several Senators approvingly noted today, has been running for seven years.

In 2011, Acting Assistant Attorney General Todd Hinnen relied on the same misleading numbers when he told the House Judiciary Committee that “on average, we seek and obtain section 215 orders less than 40 times per year.” Congressman James Sensenbrenner rightly took Hinnen to task today for juking the stats. “The Department’s testimony left the Committee with the impression that the Administration was using the business records provision sparingly and for specific materials,”Sensenbrenner writes (.pdf). “The recently released FISA order, however, could not have been drafted more broadly.”

Leaks reveal the truth in small slices. In 2006, a technician at an AT&T switching center in San Francisco followed some fiber optic splices straight into an NSA wiretapping program parked on the backbones of the internet. Now someone with access to a single Patriot Act order served on Verizon Business Solutions leaked it to the Guardian, so today’s news is that the FBI and the NSA are engaged in wholesale spying on Verizon customers. But the whole pie is certainly bigger than that.

There are hints of broader surveillance in the Verizon order. In addition to call records, the order demands cell phone data, like customers’ IMSI (International Mobile Subscriber Identity) number and another identifier that reveals the make and model of the phone. The mobile data is a non sequitur in that particular order, because Verizon Business Services isn’t a mobile carrier; it’s the long distance and landline business Verizon acquired as MCI in 2005.

The obvious conclusion is that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court uses the same catchall boilerplate order over and over again, just changing the company name and the date. The court that’s supposed to be protecting Americans from abusive domestic surveillance is not only failing in that duty, it’s also lazy.

Interesting polling of conservative bloggers for 2012 GOP Presidential nominee

The poll itself is not that interesting in itself, but what is, is the PS at the end: [Link]

PS: As a side note, want to see something scary?

In 2008, the least wanted candidates for bloggers were…John McCain and Ron Paul.

In 2012, the least wanted candidates for bloggers were…Mitt Romney and Ron Paul.

So, going by those results, Chris Christie and Jeb Bush would have to be considered the early favorites for 2016 based on the fact that conservative bloggers don’t want either of them as a nominee.

Amazon Election Heat Map 2012

Currently, 44% Blue, 56% Red. [Link]

But I thought Conservatives couldn't read?

Newspeak

'True but False'. They don't even realize how ridiculous they look. It should actually be 'True but we don't like how it makes our guy look bad'. [Link]

We cannot fault the RNC’s math, as the numbers add up. But at this point this figure doesn’t mean very much. It may simply a function of a coincidence of timing — a brief blip that could have little to do with “Obama’s job market.”

If trends hold up over the next few months, then the RNC might have a better case. But at this point we will give this statistic our rarely used label:

TRUE BUT FALSE

Oceania has always been at war with East Asia.

NTSB's call for a cell phone ban

NTSB calls for a ban on cell phones in cars. [Link]

A federal safety board called Tuesday for a nationwide ban on the use of cell phones and text messaging devices while driving.
The recommendation is the most far-reaching yet by the National Transportation Safety Board, which in the past 10 years has increasingly sought to limit the use of portable electronic devices -- recommending bans for novice drivers, school bus drivers and commercial truckers. Tuesday's recommendation, if adopted by states, would outlaw non-emergency phone calls and texting by operators of every vehicle on the road.
It would apply to hands-free as well as hand-held devices, but devices installed in the vehicle by the manufacturer would be allowed, the NTSB said.

Insurance data doesn't support this. [Link]

As state legislators across the United States enact laws that ban phoning and/or texting while driving, a new Highway Loss Data Institute study finds no reductions in crashes after hand-held phone bans take effect. Comparing insurance claims for crash damage in 4 US jurisdictions before and after such bans, the researchers find steady claim rates compared with nearby jurisdictions without such bans. The Highway Loss Data Institute (HLDI) is an affiliate of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

HLDI researchers calculated monthly collision claims per 100 insured vehicle years (a vehicle year is 1 car insured for 1 year, 2 insured for 6 months each, etc.) for vehicles up to 3 years old during the months immediately before and after hand-held phone use was banned while driving in New York (Nov. 2001), the District of Columbia (July 2004), Connecticut (Oct. 2005), and California (July 2008). Comparable data were collected for nearby jurisdictions without such bans. This method controlled for possible changes in collision claim rates unrelated to the bans — changes in the number of miles driven due to the economy, seasonal changes in driving patterns, etc.

Month-to-month fluctuations in rates of collision claims in jurisdictions with bans didn't change from before to after the laws were enacted. Nor did the patterns change in comparison with trends in jurisdictions that didn't have such laws.

"The laws aren't reducing crashes, even though we know that such laws have reduced hand-held phone use, and several studies have established that phoning while driving increases crash risk," says Adrian Lund, president of both the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and HLDI. For example, an Insurance Institute for Highway Safety study that relies on driver phone records found a 4-fold increase in the risk of injury crashes. A study in Canada found a 4-fold increase in the risk of crashes involving property damage. Separate surveys of driver behavior before and after hand-held phone use bans show reductions in the use of such phones while driving.

The HLDI database doesn't identify drivers using cellphones when their crashes occur. However, reductions in observed phone use following bans are so substantial and estimated effects of phone use on crash risk are so large that reductions in aggregate crashes would be expected. In New York the HLDI researchers did find a decrease in collision claim frequencies, relative to comparison states, but this decreasing trend began well before the state's ban on hand-held phoning while driving and actually paused briefly when the ban took effect. Trends in the District of Columbia, Connecticut, and California didn't change.

I looked at the following government statistics on vehicle accidents and made two charts.

Table 1112. Crashes by Crash Severity: 1990 to 2009

Table 1109. Distracted Drivers—Crashes/Road Fatalities and Injuries: 2005 to 2009

FATALITY ANALYSIS REPORTING SYSTEM (FARS) ENCYCLOPEDIA

I compressed the data so it would be close. This shows a drop in total accidents overall as well as fatal accidents. It does show a rise in fatal accidents due to distraction from  2005 to 2008-2009 (in red), but it has started to fall. 

This shows the same data on a logarithmic chart.

When facts get in the way of policy

Child sex trafficking statistics. The research doesn't match expectations. [Link]

• Nearly half of the kids — about 45 percent — were boys.

• Only 10 percent were involved with a "market facilitator" (e.g., a pimp).

• More than 90 percent were U.S.-born (56 percent were New York City natives).• About 45 percent got into the "business" through friends.

• On average, they started hooking at age fifteen.

• Most serviced men — preferably white and wealthy.

• Most deals were struck on the street.

• Almost 70 percent of the kids said they'd sought assistance at a youth-service agency at least once.

• Nearly all of the youths — 95 percent — said they exchanged sex for money because it was the surest way to support themselves.

In other words, the typical kid who is commercially exploited for sex in New York City is not a tween girl, has not been sold into sexual slavery, and is not held captive by a pimp.

Nearly all of the boys and girls involved in the city's sex trade are going it alone.

Curtis and Dank were amazed by what their research had revealed. But they were completely unprepared for the way law enforcement officials and child-advocacy groups reacted to John Jay's groundbreaking study.

"I remember going to a meeting in Manhattan where they had a lot of prosecutors whose job was to prosecute pimps," Curtis recalls. "They were sort of complaining about the fact that their offices were very well staffed but their workload was...not very daunting, let's say. They had a couple cases, and at every meeting you go to, they'd pull out the cherry-picked case of this pimp they had busted, and they'd tell the same story at every meeting. They, too, were bothered by the fact that they couldn't find any pimps, any girls.

"So I come along and say, 'I found 300 kids' — they're all perky — but then I say, 'I'm sorry, but only 10 percent had pimps.'

"It was like a fart in church. Because basically I was saying their office was a waste of time and money."

Income gap not as big as reported

Not that that will change anyone's mind. [Link]

New data from the University of Chicago’s Steven Kaplan shows that, despite government bailouts, in 2008 and 2009 the adjusted gross income of the top 1 percent—a disproportionate number of whom work in the financial industry—fell to 1997 levels. All in all, the fat cats took a 20 percent income hit, compared with the 7 percent lower earners suffered in the aggregate. Few economists believe that the super-rich will ever reclaim all their pre-bubble earnings.

But if the wealthy are not as well off as they once were, the middle classes were never as poorly off as liberal pundits claim. Indeed, their case that income disparity is growing rests on the notion that national productivity grew four times faster (1.95 percent per year) than median household income (0.49 percent per year) between 1979 and 2007. The remaining 1.46 percent in annual productivity gains, they postulate, must have gone straight into the Swiss bank accounts of the rich.

But there are enough holes in this argument for a Zuccotti Park cleanup crew to drive a fleet of garbage trucks through. For starters, Northwestern University economist Robert Gordon has pointed out that this analysis is based on the common price index, a number that both overstates the growth in real income among the haves and understates it for the have-nots. Indeed, globalization and big-box shopping outlets such as Walmart—the very forces that liberals blame for inequality—have vastly reduced prices for modest-income folks who shop at such venues. But the Paris Hiltons of the world who patronize stores like Versace and Roberto Cavalli haven’t benefited as much, because these businesses are almost completely immune to competitive price pressures. Once the productivity data is adjusted for such factors, Gordon found, the gap between the rich and poor grew only by 0.16 percent per year—or one-tenth of the 1.46 percent that liberals tout.

But none of this says anything about what Cowen has dubbed the “personal well-being gap”—the only gap that matters. Indeed, this gap, which measures the difference between basic goods that average people and gazillionaires like Bill Gates can afford, has been steadily closing. Gates might have personal physicians, private jets, and multiple computers. But thanks to technology-driven increases in productivity, almost everyone can afford bypass surgery, vacations and Internet access.

In America, well-being mobility, in a sense, comes to you without you having to go it. You don’t have to be income-mobile to improve your quality of life. But that doesn’t mean that Americans don’t have income mobility. Far from it. Odds are, anyone who makes basically sensible life choices such as going to college, getting and staying married (preferably to a working spouse), and working full-time will find themselves in the top income quintile in their peak earning years.

This allows more Americans to be “threshold earners”: After they reach a certain income level, they can trade more work for greater leisure, a luxury that only the filthy rich enjoy in poor countries. Were this not the case, the ranks of the Zuccotti Park protesters might have been thinner by about a third. A recent survey by business analyst Harrison Schultz and Baruch College professor Hector Cordero-Guzman found that about 30 percent of them had individual incomes between $50,000 and $150,000-plus (about the same percentage as are under- and unemployed). These people have obviously decided that they have enough money, and that they’d rather use their spare time protesting than working.

Surplus wealth, then, is driving the Occupy Wall Street movement as much as the alleged growth of income inequality. Somewhere, Joseph Schumpeter, the political economist who predicted that the very wealth that capitalism generates will undermine the intellectual case for capitalism’s existence, must be saying, “I told you so.”

Saved or Created

Bogus stat propped up by 'fact checkers'. [Link]

The Obama administration’s latest tactic for selling its jobs bill is to claim it will “support” 400,000 jobs (primarily in government). Ed Morrissey notes this metric is as unmeasurable as jobs “saved or created” by Obama’s failed stimulus law, which is a good springboard for underscoring a crucial point about the 2012 campaign.

Ace — as he occasionally does — recently buried this key point in a piece on media “fact-checking.”  He noted that the Associated Press criticized Rick Perry for saying in a debate that the stimulus “created zero jobs.” (Indeed, Politifact rated the claim as “Pants On Fire.”)  Ace observed:

Quick question, AP: How does Obama’s “saved or created” figure stack up with Bush’s? Or Clinton’s? Or the first Bush’s?
Trick question, of course, as there are no “saved or created” figures for those Presidents. The “saved or created” figure wasinvented by Obama, and thusfar has been applied to exactly one president.
When they speak of Bush only creating one million net jobs through his presidency, note they do not add in the number of jobs he might have also “saved.”
This is critical, because all previous presidents were held to account by strict, simple arithmetic: Number of jobs existing at the end of your term minus number of jobs existing at the beginning of your term equals your net job creation (or loss).
It is only President Precious who added in the “or saved” figure, and this can only be estimated, and of course we employ liberal economists’ formulas for guessing how government spending translates to job “saving” for this.
Obama has lost jobs while President. Period. That is the only statistic that has ever before mattered, net jobs created or lost. There is no third category of “saved,” and even if there were, one would have to calculate previous presidents’ “saved or created” numbers (much more generous!) to find an apples-to-apples comparison.
Instead, the AP and Obama and the rest of the media insist on this apples-to-orange comparison.

When Obama came up with the “saved or created” dodge, it wasn’t just people right of center noting it was a hustle.  People likeLawrence Katz, former chief economist for the Clinton Labor Department, called it a “silly exercise” and noted the nubers were inherently inaccurate.  This scam was so widely mocked that the Obama administration gave up officially counting jobs “saved or created” under the stimulus.   However, it was irresistible as a political gimmick; administration officials were back to using it within a matter of days to distract from the abject failure of their economic policies.

And — as the so-called “fact-checking” of Perry shows — the establishment media not only let Team Obama get away with this fantasy unchallenged, but also joins in their propaganda effort.

Bogus chart on the debt gets a new lease on life

Lies, damn lies and statistics. [Link]

So imagine our surprise when we found in our Facebook feed this week a chart, purporting to show how Republican presidents — Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush — had increased the debt by a significantly greater percentage than either Bill Clinton or President Obama. Pretty impressive chart, “liked” by at least 7,000 people on a posting by the liberal group MoveOn.org.

 But this chart, originally created by the office of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, is as phony as a three-dollar bill. Our friends at PolitiFact did a pretty thorough takedown of it in May, giving it their worst rating: “pants on fire.” They even caught the Pelosi people in a bad mathematical error, based on the fact that the Democrats calculated the numbers as if Obama took office a year later than he did.

That error greatly reduced Obama’s supposed percentage increase (from 35 percent to 16 percent) and boosted George W. Bush’s increase (from 86 percent to 115 percent). Pelosi’s office corrected the math error after it was spotted by PolitiFact, but amazingly, the chart that turned up in several places in our Facebook feed was the old chart.

 But even with the corrected number, this is still a Four-Pinocchio whopper. Let’s explain why.

The Facts

The person who posted this on Facebook noted: “From the US Treasury Dept — any questions?” But it actually is not a Treasury Department calculation, just manipulated data taken from the Treasury Web site. 

The chart has some basic conceptual flaws. In particular, it cherry-picks the data that portray Obama in the best light by claiming to show “public debt” but in actuality using the statistics for gross debt.

Gross debt includes intergovernmental transactions such as bonds held by Social Security and Medicare, but public debt is the more commonly used figure of national indebtedness.

 If the chart actually used public debt rather than gross debt, it would have put Obama and George W. Bush virtually in the same league — 60 percent increase (as of September 2011) for Obama versus 70 percent for Bush — even though Bush served as president much longer.

 But the biggest problem is that this is just dumb math. What really counts is not the raw debt numbers, but the size of the debt as a percentage of the gross domestic product. The GDP is the broadest measure of the national economy and directly indicates the nation’s ability to service its debts. In fact, the White House budget office historical tables portray much of the data as a percentage of GDP, because that is the best way to truly compare such numbers over time.

 If the chart were recast to show how much the debt went up as a percentage of GDP, it would look pretty bad for Obama after not even three years in office. In fact, Obama does almost twice as poorly as Reagan — and four times worse than George W. Bush.

Reagan: plus 14.9 percentage points

GHW Bush: plus 7.1 percentage points

Clinton: down 13.4 percentage points

GW Bush: plus 5.6 percentage points

Obama: plus 24.6 percentage points

 (Note: We derived most of these data from table 7.1 of the budget office historical tables, which gives end-of-fiscal year figures, so they do not quite match up to presidential terms. Obama’s figures are based on the GDP: public debt ratio as of June 30, 2011)

 One can offer reasons for why Obama’s performance appears so poor, including the fact that he is battling a recession. An improvement in the nation’s economy would boost the gross domestic product, which would certainly begin to reduce his ratio. But the fact remains that under basic economic measures, not phony ones, his record on the growth of the national debt is the worst of recent presidents.

Lying with Graphs and Charts

Adjusted for reality. [Link]

I had a nice healthy rant all written for this because people who use charts and data to lie piss me off and the self-righteous ones are the worst. But it detracted from this post, so if you want to, you can read it here. Not work that I'm proud of, but it's fun to write every once in a while.

There is a piece called "The Three Charts to E-Mail Your Right Wing Brother-In-Law" that is making the rounds and impressing many people who don't know too much about the underlying data. Which is almost everyone.

So lets dig into these charts and how we can fix them.

Read the whole thing.

Nonexistent Police Quotas Show up on Tape

If true, how widespread is this? Emphasis added. [Link]

The quota allegations stemmed from several audio recordings made by Officer Adil Polanco of instructions given to him and other officers by various superiors. When the recordings surfaced, NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said officers are encouraged to meet "goals," but denied the existence of arrest or citation quotas. As for the charge that the NYPD was burying reports of actual crime, those allegations came from a survey of retired high-ranking NYPD officers conducted by two Molloy College criminologists. The NYPD dismissed the study, while critics such as the Manhattan Institute's Heather Mac Donald called it "irredeemably flawed."

Now comes another set of recordings from another New York precinct that validates both the Molloy study and Polanco's allegations. Earlier this month, the Village Voice obtained over 100 recordings of roll call meetings in Brooklyn's 81st precinct made by Officer Adrian Schoolcraft. They're damning.

Schoolcraft, for example, recorded a fellow officer lamenting that he'd been instructed to downgrade a car theft to "unauthorized use of a vehicle," as well as to find a way around reporting the thefts of a cell phone and video game system. In another recording, Schoolcraft captured the results as he voiced his concerns about crime stats manipulation to a unit within the department that audits such data. One officer with the unit acknowledged the political pressure to juke the stats. "The mayor's looking for it, the police commissioner's looking for it...every commanding officer wants to show it," he said. "So there's motivation not to classify reports for the seven major crimes."

In other words, the statistical manipulation extends beyond property crimes. Journalist Debbie Nathan, who was sexually assaulted in a city park last February, says that she was shocked to learn that the officers who wrote up her report classified the crime as a misdemeanor. It was later upgraded to a felony, but only after Nathan went to the district attorney. And according to the DA's investigation, the six officers who responded to Nathan's attack admitted leaving key portions of her story out of the report. As Nathan told the Village Voice, rape crisis centers throughout New York City have documented similar complaints from victims of sexual assault.

What. The. Hell.

Playing numbers games and the only ones hurt are the victims.