Some really good framing advice.
Via Max Sawicky's blog Maxspeak, a couple of days ago Dean Baker makes a really good point about how Democrats ought to talk about the budget, and about the costs both of things we don't like (such as highway bill pork) and the things we do like (such as social spending):
But, the highly visible outrage over pork barreling has the downside of misleading people about waste in government. I will not make any apologies for the pork barrellers. I would be happy to see them all sent some place where they can personally work on the projects they slipped into the appropriations bills. However, in reality this pork barrel spending is a tiny portion of the total budget. (Representative Young’s Way will cost 0.0014 percent of the federal budget over the six year duration of the new transportation bill. His Alaska infrastructure drama will cost 0.000018 percent.) If we got Mr. Clean to sweep out all the pork barrel waste in the transportation bill it would barely change the basic budget story.
...What is annoying about this picture is that the misconceptions can be so easily countered if we just changed the reporting. If reporters got in the habit of reporting numbers as shares of the budget (or tax items as shares of total revenue), they would immediately be giving their audiences meaningful information. Everyone can understand that 0.6 percent of the federal budget goes to Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), the reformed welfare program. Only a small number of budget wonks can assign any meaning to the $16 billion annual appropriation for TANF.
Unfortunately, the liberal/progressive types who spend hundreds of millions on political campaigns and “messaging” cannot be bothered to try to counter simple and basic misconceptions that repeatedly thwart their efforts in a number of different spheres. Apparently, the message masters have never considered the possibility that one reason people don’t support spending more money on TANF (or health care or child care, etc.) is that they already believe that one third of the budget goes to TANF. This belief prompts people to ask the reasonable question – “if we’re already spending so much on poor people, and they are still poor, then why we would think that spending more money will do any good?”
He's very right. Beyond TANF, the most famous example of this phenominon is the public perception of the government's expenditure on foreign aid. For instance, here's a Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) study from 2001:
Even though a majority of the public no longer wants to cut foreign aid [compared to 1995], Americans continue to vastly overestimate how much of the federal budget goes to aid. And the public still proposes as appropriate an amount that is much larger than the actual US expenditure. PIPA asked respondents to estimate how much of the federal budget goes to foreign aid, and told them they could answer in terms of fractions of percentage points if they wished, to make them feel comfortable giving a low answer. Nonetheless, the median estimate was 20% of the budget-more than 20 times the actual amount (a bit less than 1%). The mean estimate was even higher, at 24%. Only 5% of respondents estimated an amount of 1% or less. This extreme misperception appeared in all demographic groups. Even among those with post graduate education the median estimate was 8%.
So maybe Lester Pearson and Bob Geldof were on to something with the 0.7% African aid target (though I stand by my (basically unrelated) defence of Paul Martin on the issue.) But as MaxSpeak points out, public lack of perspective also has a good application to the highway bill. The bill has been criticised for its high pork quantity, which is variously considered either too expensive in principle (see National Review) or else likely to crowd out real investment in necessary federal highway infrastructure (see Clay Risen at TNR).
According to Risen and the WaPo, the new bill will cost $286 billion over six years, including its $23 billion in earmarks (aka district-specific, transportation-related pork). By the White House's very rosy (and almost certainly lowballed) assumptions (PDF - see page 23), the average federal outlays over the next six years will be about $2.74 trillion USD. So, taking MaxSpeak's calculations a little further, the earmarks are going to cost a minimum of 0.13% of the annual budget in total. The whole bill will cost a minimum of 1.7% of the federal budget per year.
If I was feeling more imaginative right now, I could do some more government program division. But the point is, this lack of fractions, or more generally, this lack of background for the numbers being tossed about, is a pervasive problem in the popular budget literature, even the high-end stuff. Like me, you can read article after article day after day month after month and still know relatively little about the numbers involved with running the government (before my recent Google search I wouldn't have been able to ballpark the dollar figure the US government spends. And I can't either for Canada...OK, ten minutes later I can: it's $204 billion for 2005...and Statistics Canada still sucks.) But when people don't know the basics about what government costs, they can't analyze individual pieces of legislation in context and they're easily led around by the Rush Limbaughs and Grover Norquists of the world who tell them that federal spending on this or that liberal priority is just way out of control. Just switching from a popular analysis based on absolutes to one based on more meaningful relatives, like MaxSpeak suggests, would be a very good corrective.
But, the highly visible outrage over pork barreling has the downside of misleading people about waste in government. I will not make any apologies for the pork barrellers. I would be happy to see them all sent some place where they can personally work on the projects they slipped into the appropriations bills. However, in reality this pork barrel spending is a tiny portion of the total budget. (Representative Young’s Way will cost 0.0014 percent of the federal budget over the six year duration of the new transportation bill. His Alaska infrastructure drama will cost 0.000018 percent.) If we got Mr. Clean to sweep out all the pork barrel waste in the transportation bill it would barely change the basic budget story.
...What is annoying about this picture is that the misconceptions can be so easily countered if we just changed the reporting. If reporters got in the habit of reporting numbers as shares of the budget (or tax items as shares of total revenue), they would immediately be giving their audiences meaningful information. Everyone can understand that 0.6 percent of the federal budget goes to Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), the reformed welfare program. Only a small number of budget wonks can assign any meaning to the $16 billion annual appropriation for TANF.
Unfortunately, the liberal/progressive types who spend hundreds of millions on political campaigns and “messaging” cannot be bothered to try to counter simple and basic misconceptions that repeatedly thwart their efforts in a number of different spheres. Apparently, the message masters have never considered the possibility that one reason people don’t support spending more money on TANF (or health care or child care, etc.) is that they already believe that one third of the budget goes to TANF. This belief prompts people to ask the reasonable question – “if we’re already spending so much on poor people, and they are still poor, then why we would think that spending more money will do any good?”
He's very right. Beyond TANF, the most famous example of this phenominon is the public perception of the government's expenditure on foreign aid. For instance, here's a Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) study from 2001:
Even though a majority of the public no longer wants to cut foreign aid [compared to 1995], Americans continue to vastly overestimate how much of the federal budget goes to aid. And the public still proposes as appropriate an amount that is much larger than the actual US expenditure. PIPA asked respondents to estimate how much of the federal budget goes to foreign aid, and told them they could answer in terms of fractions of percentage points if they wished, to make them feel comfortable giving a low answer. Nonetheless, the median estimate was 20% of the budget-more than 20 times the actual amount (a bit less than 1%). The mean estimate was even higher, at 24%. Only 5% of respondents estimated an amount of 1% or less. This extreme misperception appeared in all demographic groups. Even among those with post graduate education the median estimate was 8%.
So maybe Lester Pearson and Bob Geldof were on to something with the 0.7% African aid target (though I stand by my (basically unrelated) defence of Paul Martin on the issue.) But as MaxSpeak points out, public lack of perspective also has a good application to the highway bill. The bill has been criticised for its high pork quantity, which is variously considered either too expensive in principle (see National Review) or else likely to crowd out real investment in necessary federal highway infrastructure (see Clay Risen at TNR).
According to Risen and the WaPo, the new bill will cost $286 billion over six years, including its $23 billion in earmarks (aka district-specific, transportation-related pork). By the White House's very rosy (and almost certainly lowballed) assumptions (PDF - see page 23), the average federal outlays over the next six years will be about $2.74 trillion USD. So, taking MaxSpeak's calculations a little further, the earmarks are going to cost a minimum of 0.13% of the annual budget in total. The whole bill will cost a minimum of 1.7% of the federal budget per year.
If I was feeling more imaginative right now, I could do some more government program division. But the point is, this lack of fractions, or more generally, this lack of background for the numbers being tossed about, is a pervasive problem in the popular budget literature, even the high-end stuff. Like me, you can read article after article day after day month after month and still know relatively little about the numbers involved with running the government (before my recent Google search I wouldn't have been able to ballpark the dollar figure the US government spends. And I can't either for Canada...OK, ten minutes later I can: it's $204 billion for 2005...and Statistics Canada still sucks.) But when people don't know the basics about what government costs, they can't analyze individual pieces of legislation in context and they're easily led around by the Rush Limbaughs and Grover Norquists of the world who tell them that federal spending on this or that liberal priority is just way out of control. Just switching from a popular analysis based on absolutes to one based on more meaningful relatives, like MaxSpeak suggests, would be a very good corrective.
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