"An Op-Ed article on Saturday about President Richard M. Nixon's management of the economy misstated the amount of the projected budget deficit for 2004. It is $521 billion, not trillion."

Of course it was on outside "op-ed contributor" who made the goof, not a Times columnist (or there would have been no correction). Same order of magnitude as Graydon Carter's error that moved the federal debt from trillions to quadrillions. And, naturally, the error was in a direction unflattering to the Bush administration. If this same kind of error had been made and corrected with respect to Iraq policy, Andrew Sullivan would have been all over it. So where is he now? Nowhere -- because spending and deficits are issues where he agrees with the Times, and is content to let them err as they will and make all manner of errors himself.

Let me be clear here. I basically agree with Sullivan on spending, and I agree with him on Iraq, too. Hey, I even agree with him on same-sex marriage (and it's fine with me if he wants to write about it a lot). I shouldn't have to say any of that. I think I've been on record plenty as to my opposition to the expansion in government spending (and the associated expansion in government itself) on Bush's watch. My point was never to defend the spending, but only to highlight the sloppy, ill-informed and ad hominem nature of Sullivan's critique -- even though I agree with his general view on this. I'm not even trying to pick on Sullivan, in particular. He's just another example of how pundits start with a set of priors about some issue, and then reflexively defend to the death any politician who embodies that point of view or, conversely, savagely attack any one who doesn't (calling him a liar, etc.), whether or not the pundit clearly understands the facts or has any idea how to qualify the sources he cites in the attack or the defense. Sullivan's record of howlers on this issue speaks for itself, and are especially disturbing considering that he plays both sides of the fence with Bush -- praising him on Iraq as though he were a genius and a sincere man and protecting him against all critics, and damning him on spending as though he were a lying imbecile and embracing even the most wrong-headed critiques. One man can't be both things, and that's the problem with ad hominem analyses of issues -- and a problem when pundits get into areas requiring domain expertise they don't really have. What does Sullivan really know about public economics? Nothing. For that matter, what does he know about military affairs? Nothing. But that's the pundit game, I suppose. Sullivan is not an especially egregious example. Happens all the time.

With all that as background, I was distressed to get this stinging letter from my colleague Bruce Bartlett in response to my post clarifying what President Bush meant about spending on "Meet the Press." I've reminded Bruce of my bona fides on this issue, but I thought his letter made a lot of great points, so I will run it here anyway:

I think you have made the same mistake Bush made on spending. If you look at your chart it is clearly labeled "budget authority." This is not the same thing as spending, which most people would equate to "outlays." By that measure, spending is way up.

Just so you understand, theoretically, Congress must first authorize appropriations. Only after there has been an authorization can funds be appropriated. Thus an authorization allows spending and in principle puts a lid on what can be spent. The problem is that in any given year there is very little relationship between the two because authorizations can carry over from previous years. Thus Congress may appropriate far more than is authorized in any given year. Consequently, looking only at authorizations is virtually meaningless in terms of determining how tight or loose the budget is. You would probably have to cut authorizations by 25% to get any meaningful reduction in appropriations.

Furthermore, authorizations by definition exclude supplementals. This is spending over and above regular appropriations. In principle, supplementals should only be used for special, unanticipated, one-time expenses. However, the administration has used supplementals as a kind of loophole to hide the cost of the Iraq operation. In the latest budget, for example, there is no money in the defense budget for the Iraq operation, even though everyone knows it will cost at least $50 billion this year. The administration said it would make a supplemental request for Iraq subsequently.

From this I think you can see that the administration has been utterly dishonest in its portrayal of its budget policy. It ignores outlays, which are all that matter, and focuses on the meaningless figure of authorizations, and pretends that supplementals don't exist. This is as bad as anything Enron ever did. You should not be defending the administration for such behavior.

The Times wrote in its correction:

"An Op-Ed article on Saturday about President Richard M. Nixon's management of the economy misstated the amount of the projected budget deficit for 2004. It is $521 billion, not trillion."

They'll have to run a correction for that correction, since Richard M. Nixon hasn't projected any budget deficits for quite some time. Certainly none since his death in 1994, and not many after 1974, either.

"[O]nly 60 percent of Republicans say their party leader is better at controlling government spending than the Democratic contender. Democrats and unaffiliated voters say that Kerry is better. Fifty-three percent (53%) of conservative voters say Bush is better on controlling spending while 21% name Kerry. Among moderates, 20% think the President is better while 54% name Kerry. Self-identified liberal voters overwhelmingly say Kerry is better."

But let's take the same lofty view on this matter that Sullivan takes when it comes to another matter where he is in agreement with the administration -- the war in Iraq. Let's not parse words, and worry about who said or didn't say "imminent" or, in this case, whether there's an important difference between "budget authority" and what really gets spent. The real issue isn't in the arena of discretionary spending at all. It's in the arena of entitlements -- the massive new entitlements that have been adopted with bipartisan cooperation during this administration, such as the Medicare prescription drug benefit. Get real, all you spending hawks. Bush campaigned in 2000 on this one. Don't get all huffy now that your "compassionate conservative" has simply done exactly what he promised. Did you expect him to change his mind and grant your wishes to the contrary of his campaign promises once elected? And let's not have any fantasies that Bush would have gotten elected in 2000 without taking such positions, or that John Kerry is going to do a better job in this domain if elected in 2004. We're all just getting the spending we voted for.

Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 12:51 PM | link  

Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 10:06 AM | link