We all know how democracy is supposed to work. Politicians are supposed to campaign on the issues, and an informed public is supposed to cast its votes based on those issues, with some allowance for the politicians’ perceived character and competence.
We also all know that the reality falls far short of the ideal. Voters are often misinformed, and politicians aren’t reliably truthful. Still, we like to imagine that voters generally get it right in the end, and that politicians are eventually held accountable for what they do.
But is even this modified, more realistic vision of democracy in action still relevant? Or has our political system been so degraded by misinformation and disinformation that it can no longer function?
Well, consider the case of the budget deficit — an issue that dominated Washington discussion for almost three years, although it has recently receded.
You probably won’t be surprised to hear that voters are poorly informed about the deficit. But you may be surprised by just how misinformed.
In a well-known paper with a discouraging title, “It Feels Like We’re Thinking,” the political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels reported on a 1996 survey that asked voters whether the budget deficit had increased or decreased under President Clinton. In fact, the deficit was down sharply, but a plurality of voters — and a majority of Republicans — believed that it had gone up.
I wondered on my blog what a similar survey would show today, with the deficit falling even faster than it did in the 1990s. Ask and ye shall receive: Hal Varian, the chief economist of Google, offered to run a Google Consumer Survey — a service the company normally sells to market researchers — on the question. So we asked whether the deficit has gone up or down since January 2010. And the results were even worse than in 1996: A majority of those who replied said the deficit has gone up, with more than 40 percent saying that it has gone up a lot. Only 12 percent answered correctly that it has gone down a lot.
Am I saying that voters are stupid? Not at all. People have lives, jobs, children to raise. They’re not going to sit down with Congressional Budget Office reports. Instead, they rely on what they hear from authority figures. The problem is that much of what they hear is misleading if not outright false.
The outright falsehoods, you won’t be surprised to learn, tend to be politically motivated. In those 1996 data, Republicans were much more likely than Democrats to hold false views about the deficit, and the same must surely be true today. After all, Republicans made a lot of political hay over a supposedly runaway deficit early in the Obama administration, and they have maintained the same rhetoric even as the deficit has plunged. Thus Eric Cantor, the second-ranking Republican in the House, declared on Fox News that we have a “growing deficit,” while Senator Rand Paul told Bloomberg Businessweek that we’re running “a trillion-dollar deficit every year.”
Do people like Mr. Cantor or Mr. Paul know that what they’re saying isn’t true? Do they care? Probably not. In Stephen Colbert’s famous formulation, claims about runaway deficits may not be true, but they have truthiness, and that’s all that matters.
Still, aren’t there umpires for this sort of thing — trusted, nonpartisan authorities who can and will call out purveyors of falsehood? Once upon a time, I think, there were. But these days the partisan divide runs very deep, and even those who try to play umpire seem afraid to call out falsehood. Incredibly, the fact-checking site PolitiFact rated Mr. Cantor’s flatly false statement as “half true.”
Now, Washington still does have some “wise men,” people who are treated with special deference by the news media. But when it comes to the issue of the deficit, the supposed wise men turn out to be part of the problem. People like Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, the co-chairmen of President Obama’s deficit commission, did a lot to feed public anxiety about the deficit when it was high. Their report was ominously titled “The Moment of Truth.” So have they changed their tune as the deficit has come down? No — so it’s no surprise that the narrative of runaway deficits remains even though the budget reality has completely changed.
Put it all together, and it’s a discouraging picture. We have an ill-informed or misinformed electorate, politicians who gleefully add to the misinformation and watchdogs who are afraid to bark. And to the extent that there are widely respected, not-too-partisan players, they seem to be fostering, not fixing, the public’s false impressions.
So what should we be doing? Keep pounding away at the truth, I guess, and hope it breaks through. But it’s hard not to wonder how this system is supposed to work.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: August 16, 2013
An earlier version of this column misstated the ranking of Eric Cantor. He is the second-ranking House Republican, not the third.
By PAUL KRUGMAN
COMMENT ON THIS BY : the Common Constitutionalist
Bush: Deficits Bad, Obama: Deficits Required
You can always count on genius economist Paul Krugman to tell the truth… as he sees it. He wrote an article last week, published in the “paper of record” (hah), The New York Times entitled “Moment of Truthiness“.
Wow Paul; how provocative yet whimsical. What’s life without a little whimsy?
The article was regarding the deficit and how voters “are often misinformed and politicians aren’t reliably truthful”. On that point he will get no argument from me. He said how “voters are poorly informed about the deficit”.
That may be Paul, but most voters don’t give two hoots about the federal deficit as they go off to their part-time jobs because either their hours have been cut to part-time status due to Obamacare or a part time gig is all they can find.
Anywho, he claimed that voters today have not been informed how much the budget deficit has actually fallen. Krugman asked Google’s chief economist Hal Varian to run a consumer survey (at no charge of course) to find out. It’s nice when leftists do favors for other leftists. Have Limbaugh or Glenn Beck ask Varian for a free survey.
The results were that 40% thought it had gone up a lot. Only 12% said it had gone down. Not that I trust any numbers calculated by the government from either side of the aisle, but let’s take them at their words, this time.
Krugman explained that Republicans not Democrats were lying or ignorant, citing examples of Eric Cantor and Rand Paul saying that we are running trillion dollar deficits every year.
Krugman asked his readers whether the Republicans knew the deficit was shrinking or even if they cared – rhetorically of course. His answer was, they don’t care. He implied they would just continue to misinform the poor electorate.
So what about the deficit? Well, the White House said recently the deficit will shrink to $759 billion.
Oh happy day! I guess were supposed to celebrate that. According to Luke Johnson at the Huff Po, it is great news. Only $759 billion. Of course it is a “will shrink” estimate. It hasn’t shrunk to that yet, but government estimates, as we all know, are always accurate and are never quietly adjusted up or down at a later date.
Johnson explained it will be the first deficit under $1 trillion in the Obama presidency and then added that Obama inherited Bush’s mess. They just can’t get past “Bush Derangement Syndrome”.
But what if it were still Bush? Would they be so gleeful speaking about $759 billion deficits? Let’s take a look, shall we.
Andrew Taylor wrote in July of 2008: “the government’s budget deficit will surge past half a trillion next year, according to gloomy new estimates… a record flood of red ink. The deficit will hit $482 billion in the 2009 budget year. That results in the biggest deficit ever in terms of dollars… The figures are so eye-popping in dollar terms that it may restrain the appetite of the next president to add to the deficit with expensive spending programs…” Nice to know that didn’t happen.
Whoa, step back! Did he really say $482 billion and gloom and record red ink? Huh. Funny, but I haven’t heard it described quite that way in recent years.
In 2004, Robert Freeman, a progressive blogger and commie described a “Bush budget deficit death spiral”. He explained that it is good for a few but “a death sentence for all the rest of the country. The 2004 deficit reached $415 billion, a record”.
So let’s see – $759 billion (maybe) – $415 billion equals a difference of $344 billion (minimum). Wow – almost double. I’m just saying.
In September 2009, Freeman wrote that Bush’s first full year delivered a $157 billion deficit and he never looked back. Maybe that’s what Obama means by his slogan “Forward”… to higher deficits?
Finally in 2011, just two years ago, Freeman wrote excusing Obama’s deficit spending by affirming the old Keynesian diatribe: “did the turnaround require deficit spending? Of course it did!”
So the statists just affirmed what we already know. When a Republican is president, regardless of the circumstances; 9/11/2001, nine months into Bush’s presidency; deficits are bad and are never required.
When a Marxist is president, deficits aren’t bad and are required. Of course they are silly.
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