This may not do justice to the actual commercials, but the Democrats and Republicans arguing over the Contract are surely reproducing those commercials’ essential elements. They are accusing one another of lying about the facts; they are trying very hard to make their own programs synonymous with the listener’s starkest self-interest, as they understand it; and they are bolstering this pitch with a torrent of numbers and data that sound authoritative-until the opposition immediately sets out to undermine them. As with people solidly committed to one or another of the contending phone companies, so down-the-line Democrats and Republicans will no doubt accept their leaders’ word and leave it at that. But what is everyone else supposed to do?
I couldn’t begin to yes-and-no all the details of the political parties’ claims concerning what much of the disputed legislation will do. Only the experts and specialists can. For even the numbers themselves are in contention, and certainly the accuracy of the terminology - “cut, " “balance,” “cost,” “save,” etc. - is. But there are at least a few general principles and cautions that will help if you keep them in mind when the conflicting, partisan assertions are coming at you.
The first is that money is the root of all confusion. The Democrats (as the Republicans will be quick to tell you) accuse the majority party of cutting money from programs for the poor for which they may actually be increasing money, but cutting the rate of increase. The Republicans (as the Democrats will point out) describe their own cutting of various costly programs as if this would represent a saving to the taxpayer, whereas it may simply represent a transfer of costs from the federal treasury to state and local treasuries, for which the same taxpayer is still going to have to pony up.
There are a couple more money wrinkles to watch out for, One of these keeps coming at us in relation to the horrendous financial crisis of the District of Columbia. It is the assumption that all funds going to what you regard as a socially beneficial program are going to help that program’s designated beneficiaries and that all cuts of such funds will hurt them. The assumption may be true, but it may also be false. In the District we have seen examples of the money’s going to enlarge bureaucracy and inflate payroll in a way that has diminished significantly the funds available to assist those who are supposed to be getting help. Similarly, when you read that the new Congress has heftily cut spending in some agency, it can’t hurt to wonder and, if you get a chance, inquire about what precisely it didn’t cut. An awful lot of plain old congressional pork seems to have been left untouched in bills that are purported by their Republican sponsors to be true and fearless economy moves.
The second main caution to keep in mind is this: most predictions of what various cuts and/or reforms will do-the reassuring, upbeat ones as well as the scary, doomsday ones-are, at best, chancy. Some of them are worse than chancy; they are off the wall. This is a repeat of last year’s chaotic debate over the administration s gigantic health-care bill. The Contract provisions do not represent anything like so compendious and multiparted a single program. But like the health-care bill’s provisions many of them rest on complicated and near-unreadable calculations. And they often involve unprecedented features and mechanisms whose impact on people is untested, so that their results are extremely hard to foretell. Politicians who are aware of the unintended consequences of so many Great Society programs should be aware by now of the need for humility in predicting the impact of any large programmatic innovation.
But of course they are not. And this leads to a third warning: be aware at all times, when the numbers are flying and assertions of things to come growing more bold, that you are probably being jerked around and subjected to well-crafted political spin. In the health-care debate of last year, in part as a substitute for reasoned discussion and in part because the thing was actually too unwieldy to discuss and seemed to offer at least some evidence for just about any charge that was made, there was a prodigious effort to stir up the usual fears and resentments. Proponents and opponents alike indulged heavily in such behavior. This time there is a different set of demons and a new array of purported heavies (the “greedy rich,” the “lazy poor”). But the nature of much of the argument all around is the same, an attempt to make people feel threatened or ashamed or cheated one way or another.
I thought one of the most interesting comments Newt Gingrich made recently was his concession, complete with apology, to fellow Republicans that he was responsible for leading them into a kind of public-relations trap vis-a-vis the changes in the schoollunch program. Gingrich did not, and I believe does not, say that what his majority party seeks to do is either wrong or extreme or hardhearted or anti-kid or anything like that, as charged. Rather he suggested that it was wrong to have let the party get set up for such an assault, and-this is the part I found especially striking -seemed to evince a kind of grudging admiration for a campaign he clearly deplored. He sounded like one of those generals in a particularly hard-fought skirmish who speak with great professional respect to their junior officers about the brilliant battlefield tactics of their enemy counterpart.
If you listen to the debate going on with these warnings in mind- beware of all assumptions based only on dollar amounts, all predictions and all efforts to turn you into a raving, resentful beast-you may not change your mind. But you will be at least marginally ahead of the game. The game is to simplify and distort some very important business you should know about.
