Re: [school-discuss] something about the news from washington that was "aired out" in the new york times

["Kevin Stiles" <kstiles@pasco.wednet.edu>]

And what exactly does this have with this list?

If we are going to be posting political propaganda, remove me from this list.

Kevin Stile

At 09:00 AM 8/6/2002 -0500, you wrote:
>The Memory HoleBy PAUL KRUGMAN
>
>
>
>inston Smith, the protagonist of George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four," 
>was a
>rewrite man. His job was to destroy documents that could undermine the
>government's pretense of infallibility, and replace them with altered
>versions.
>Lately, Winston Smith has gone to Washington. I'm sure that lots of 
>history is
>being falsified as you read this - there are several three-letter agencies I
>don't trust at all - but two cases involving the federal budget caught my
>eye.
>  First is the "Chicago line." Shortly after Sept. 11, George W. Bush told 
> his
>budget director that the only valid reasons to break his pledge not to run
>budget deficits would be if the country experienced recession, war or
>national emergency. "Lucky me," he said. "I hit the trifecta."
>  When I first reported this remark, angry readers accused me of inventing 
> it.
>Mr. Bush, they said, is a decent man who would never imply that the nation's
>woes had taken him off the hook, let alone make a joke out of it.
>Soon afterward, the trifecta story became part of Mr. Bush's standard stump
>speech. It always gets a roar of appreciative laughter from Republican
>audiences.
>  So what's the Chicago line? In his speeches, Mr. Bush claims to have 
> laid out
>the criteria for running a deficit when visiting Chicago during the 2000
>campaign. But there's no evidence that he said anything of the sort during
>the campaign, in Chicago or anywhere else; certainly none of the reporters
>who were with him can remember it. (The New Republic, which has tracked the
>claim, titled one of its pieces "Stop him before he lies again.") In fact,
>during the campaign his budget promises were unqualified, for good reason. If
>he had conceded that future surpluses were not guaranteed, voters might have
>wondered whether it was wise to lock in a 10-year tax cut.
>  About that 10-year tax cut: It basically takes place in two phases. 
> Phase I,
>which has mainly happened already, is a smallish tax cut for the middle
>class. Phase II, which won't be completed until 2010, is a considerably
>larger cut that goes mostly to the richest 1 percent of taxpayers.
>  That two-phase structure offers substantial opportunities for misdirection.
>If someone suggests reconsidering future tax cuts, the administration can
>accuse him of wanting to raise taxes in a recession - implying, falsely, that
>he wants to reverse Phase I rather than simply call off Phase II. On the
>other hand, if someone says that tax cuts have worsened the budget picture,
>the administration can say that tax cuts explain only 15 percent of the move
>into deficit. This sounds definitive, but in fact it refers only to the
>impact of Phase I on this year's budget; by the administration's own
>estimates, 40 percent of the $4 trillion deterioration in the 10-year outlook
>is due to tax cuts.
>  There is, however, an art to this sort of deception: you have to imply the
>falsehood without actually saying it outright. Last month the Office of
>Management and Budget got sloppy: it issued a press release stating flatly
>that tax cuts were responsible for only 15 percent of the 10-year
>deterioration. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noticed, and I
>reported it here.
>  Now for the fun part. The O.M.B. reacted angrily, and published a letter in
>The Times attacking me. It attributed the misstatement to "error," and
>declared that it had been "retracted." Was it?
>  It depends on what you mean by the word "retract." As far as anyone knows,
>O.M.B. didn't issue a revised statement conceding that it had misinformed
>reporters and giving the right numbers. It simply threw the embarrassing
>document down the memory hole. As Brendan Nyhan pointed out in Salon, if you
>go to the O.M.B.'s Web site now you find a press release dated July 12 that
>is not the release actually handed out on that date. There is no indication
>that anything has been changed, but the bullet point on sources of the
>deficit is gone.
>Every government tries to make excuses for its past errors, but I don't think
>any previous U.S. administration has been this brazen about rewriting history
>to make itself look good. For this kind of thing to happen you have to have
>politicians who have no qualms about playing Big Brother; officials whose
>partisan loyalty trumps their professional scruples; and a press corps that,
>with some honorable exceptions, lets the people in power get away with it.
>  Lucky us: we hit the trifecta.