Paul Krugman and Jonathan Chait Are Spending This Morning Worrying About Whether a Technocratic Dialogue Is Even Possible Today: Friday Focus: April 18, 2014
And:
I’m on the only one who finds the different liberal and conservative responses to the launch of Ezra Klein and company’s http://vox.com and to Nate Silver and company’s http://fivethirtyeight.com (and, no doubt, David Leonhardt’s forthcoming The Upshot, and to Jonathan Cohn’s ) to be profoundly alarming?
The criticisms from the left–of, for example Roger Pielke Jr.’s extremely unfortunate claims that we are not yet or will never (it is not clear) see the signal of climate change in the material and human cost of disasters–were: “This is not what we ordered; this is not what you promised; this is not reality based”.
The criticisms from the right have been: “nah, nah, nah; we have our fingers in our ears; we can’t hear you!” For example, Josh Marshall sends us to Byron York:
[Ezra Klein’s] schtick, which he perfected at the Post, is to present political arguments as data-driven wonkery, and himself as a pragmatist who follows the data wherever it leads. He built a whole brand on that at the Post, where he appeared in non-opinion areas of the website and paper. Now he’s expanding it with Vox. That has always been my objection to that type of work: It is often political advocacy presenting itself as disinterested, wonkish, pragmatic analysis. It’s not…
But does Byron York have any substantive complaints about any of Ezra Klein’s numbers?
This is the closet thing I can find:
Byron York: Nancy Pelosi says 9.5 million now covered thanks to Obamacare; Byron York offers reality check | Twitchy: “New: Modest Obamacare reforms insured more people than massive system overhaul…
…http://ow.ly/vdUVh: Look for that 9.5 million, or perhaps a rounded-up 10 million, to be come the talking point for Obamacare supporters in coming days…. 4.5 million previously uninsured people are now on Medicaid; 3 million previously uninsured young people are now covered because of a provision that allows them to stay on their parents’ policies until age 26; and 2 million previously uninsured people have purchased coverage on the Obamacare exchanges…. Assume all the numbers are correct…. By far the largest part of Obamacare’s health coverage expansion has come from a) expanding Medicaid, and b) allowing young people to stay on their parents’ coverage. The part where Democrats essentially blew up the health care markets, imposed the individual mandate, and caused premiums to rise and deductibles to skyrocket? That hasn’t been such a success…. Democrats could have enacted two relatively small changes… and achieved most of what Obamacare has achieved so far. Would Republicans have supported such changes back in 2009 and 2010? Who knows?… Democrats had about 255 votes in the House and 60 in the Senate. They could… [have] pursu[ed] more modest reforms that would have helped millions. Or they could blow things up and impose burdens on millions…. They chose to blow things up. And that is the context for today’s new numbers…
The big problems with York are, of course, three:
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we know that Republicans would have been opposed to Medicaid expansion in 2009-10. The Medicaid expansion was a policy proposed by Obama, and Republicans opposed everything proposed by Obama.
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We know that Medicaid expansion was never a “modest” part of Obamacare. Medicaid expansion is the left/single-payer/cover-the-poor part of ObamaCare. The marketplaces are the centrist/market/insurance company/cover-the-less-poor-but-still-uninsured. Both were about half of the coverage expansions, always. Does Byron York not know this? Did he never read any of the CBO or other projections? Or does he just want to ignore them–and what Obamacare was–confident that nobody on the right wing will call him out for making stuff up?
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It looks like it is not 2 million but 4.5 million newly-insured via private insurance on the marketplaces, and it was never projected to be much larger than that in the program’s first year of implementation. Just as with Medicare Part D and RomneyCare in Massachusetts, that number is highly likely to rise over time. And if you want a durable long-run private market for health insurance in the United States, something like the marketplaces to curb adverse selection is essential: private markets subject to too much adverse selection collapse, and the ability of insurers (and potential patience) to figure out and make use of adverse selection is only growing over time. Mitt Romney, in Byron York’s words, “blew up” the private individual health-insurance market in Massachusetts in the mid-2000s because it was approaching collapse.
My hope now is that climate change and health insurance will prove to be the last gasp of right-wing epistemic closure: that as the next big issues come to fore, people will remember the disastrous substantive positions on which they chose to dig in, and think twice. But I admit I am not holding my breath…
Paul Krugman: On the Liberal Bias of Facts: “‘The facts have a well-known liberal bias’…
…declared Rob Corddry…. But why?… Ezra Klein cited research showing that both liberals and conservatives are subject to strong tribal bias…. [But] liberals don’t engage in the kind of mass rejections of evidence…. Yes, you can find examples where some liberals got off on a hobbyhorse of one kind or another, or where the liberal conventional wisdom turned out wrong. But you don’t see the kind of lockstep rejection of evidence that we see over and over again on the right… rejection of climate science… refusal to admit that Obamacare is in fact reaching a lot of previously uninsured Americans?…
The most likely answer lies… in the difference between the two sides’ goals and institutions…. Jonathan Chait… says, the big Obamacare comeback and the reaction of the right are a very good illustration of the forces at work…. The reaction to Ezra Klein’s own note about the resignation of Kathleen Sebelius, which was intended as analysis rather than advocacy; Klein simply made the fairly obvious point that the HHS secretary was in effect free to resign now because Obamacare has been turned around and is going well. But Klein’s statement was met with a mix of outrage and ridicule on the right; how dare he suggest that the program was succeeding? Why is it, then, that the right treats statements of fact as proof of liberal bias?
Chait’s answer… is that… Conservatives want smaller government as an end in itself; liberals… want government to… [work]…. But this can’t be the whole story. It doesn’t explain, for example, the rejection of polls in 2012, or the refusal of the right to admit that things weren’t going well in Iraq–both cases in which conservatives really did have an interest in the outcomes.
So what else differentiates the two sides?… The lack of a comprehensive liberal media environment comparable to the closed conservative universe…. The different incentives of opinion leaders, which in turn go back to the huge difference in resources… there are more conservative than liberal billionaires, and it shows…. I like to say that there are three kinds of economists: Liberal professional economists, conservative professional economists, and professional conservative economists. The other box isn’t entirely empty, but there just isn’t enough money on the left to close the hack gap.
Finally, I do believe that there is a difference in temperament between the sides. I know that it doesn’t show up in the experiments done so far…. I’d be the first to admit that I don’t have solid evidence for that claim. I am, after all, a liberal…
Jonathan Chait: Why the New Data Journalism Really Is Partisan: “Four years ago… President Obama… Blair House…
…the last, best attempt to redeem a basic promise… that reason could drive out passion. In his opening remarks, one can see Obama’s once-certain conviction reduced to a wan hope…. That original spirit has returned, though–not in electoral politics, but in journalism. Vox.com, FiveThirtyEight, and the Upshot… all promise, in one form or another, an ethos of empiricism….
The empiricists may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in them. The data journalism movement… has spurred a fierce ideological backlash…. In American politics, reliance on empiricism is an ideology. The hope that disinterested experts might guide our public-policy debates was a foundational belief of the progressive movement a century ago. Laissez-faire ideology did not require empirical confirmation–conservatives regarded the free market as both self-correcting and a perfect moral arbiter of social value. It was activist government that required an army of nerds… Walter Lippmann… managerial bureaucracy… the Brookings Institution… social science… the elevation of measurable outcomes, not abstract rights. When an early Brookings study angered coal-mine operators by endorsing nationalization, the Brookings president shot back, “We are concerned only in finding out what will promote the general welfare.” Using economic policy to promote the general welfare… presupposes that market incomes are not sacrosanct….
The scale of the divide was placed on vivid display during the 2012 election, when Silver–attempting to measure the ideologically neutral question of who would win the election–nonetheless became a partisan flash point…. Conservatives mounted their own critiques ranging from the philosophical (Jonah Goldberg: “the soul–particularly when multiplied into the complexity of a society–is not so easily number-crunched”) to the quasi-scientific (Sean Trende and Jay Cost leaned heavily on the term “bimodal distribution” to arrive at dramatically cheerier prognoses for Mitt Romney). The poll-unskewing movement infected mainstream reporters and commentators, many of whom declared the election a toss-up….
The war over the fate of Obamacare… shares many of the same qualities as the great poll-unskewing battle of 2012…. At the Blair House summit… [Paul] Ryan asserted, “the bill does not control costs, the bill does not reduce deficits,” and rattled off a series of bullet points that bolstered, or seemed to bolster, his point. The Wall Street Journal editorial page reprinted his remarks. The YouTube clip of the confrontation attracted over a million views. Ecstatic conservatives declared Ryan the obvious victor and began touting him as presidential timber. In fact, Ryan’s argument was wildly and often amateurishly wrong… utter nonsense, but well at home among the kinds of analysis circulating among leading Republican health-care wonks.
There will never be a single dramatic moment that will shatter the right’s inbred health-care falsehoods the way the election, in a single night, discredited the poll-unskewers. But the Congressional Budget Office’s update on Obamacare issued last week is the latest and most powerful repudiation of the case Ryan and his allies made…. If you followed coverage by Klein, or Jonathan Cohn (who is starting a policy vertical at the New Republic), or Sarah Kliff, you you have gotten an account of Obamacare’s successes and failures as accurate as Silver’s account of the campaign horse race. If you have followed analysts on the right, even the best-informed ones, you have wallowed in a world of self-delusion…. Evaluating health care, or other government programs, by objective criteria sounds perfectly neutral. But to do so is to disregard the deep moral belief held by most conservatives that big government is inherently wrong. The empirical evenhandedness of the new data journalists is a wonderful contribution to American public life. It is, however, anything but politically neutral.
Joan Walsh: Last gasps of a dying movement: Obamacare obstructionists’ self-created trap: ”
Kevin McCarthy doesn’t have the best timing…
…The House majority whip released what he hoped would be the foundational document of Obamacare truthers, “Debunking Obamacare’s 7 million enrollees ‘success’ story,” the same day the White House announced that in fact, 8.03 million Americans had enrolled in the insurance exchanges…. Imagine how many more people might have been covered if shrill Republicans hadn’t made repealing and obstructing the ACA their top priority. The news that 35 percent of enrollees are under 35 is particularly heartening….
The campaign to discredit the act will continue. McCarthy’s dumb document lists five new metrics for measuring success, including how many enrollees have actually paid, and how many didn’t have insurance before. Those are old talking points, but they’ve added a new one–how many received subsidies–which is ugly…tacks on an ugly parenthetical, asking “how many received a subsidy (raising concerns about fraud).” Brian Beutler at the New Republic calls this an effort to… stigmatize it and also make it subject to the same hysteria about “fraud” that conservatives use to smear other social programs. Remember that Sen. Ted Cruz called the subsidies “sugar,” telling Sean Hannity that when Americans got a taste of it, they’d be “addicted to the sugar, addicted to the subsidies. And once that happens, in all likelihood, it never gets…”
“It’s over,” Hannity declared. “It never gets repealed.”
Exactly.
Still, a high rate of subsidies will let the GOP continue to demonize the “takers” vs. the “makers.” But some of them are going to have a big problem: A lot of the takers will turn out to be their voters. Poor Mitch McConnell…. McConnell seems appropriately alarmed. The man who has repeatedly pledged to “repeal” the law just this week told health care workers in Kentucky that repealing the law can’t happen while Obama is president, so “we’re going to figure out a way to get this fixed.” That softer tone isn’t sitting well with his Tea Party challenger Matt Bevin…