This should be an easy job. Just photoshop an image of a black hole with a giant pile of nearly a trillion dollars falling into it.
How much of the stimulus went to temporarily prop up state government budgets and how it permanently increased the budgets of the states that accepted it. Bonus points for explaining how Texas is so successful while refusing this temporary windfall.
ADDED: The above effect on future state budgets could be illustrated as being caused by synchrotron radiation coming from the dollar bills falling in at relativistic speeds.
How "the most shovel ready" project of weatherizing houses became the slowest because the Department of Labor has to make Davis-Bacon "prevailing wage" calculations for 30,000 localities (still not finished...).
Etc.
I fear he'll either show us that he's a fool or what his price is.
How much went to temporarily prop up state govt budgets? Zero, even though preventing a teacher layoff would've been about the most efficient use of stimulus dollars possible. The twins from Maine held the bill hostage until no money was given to state government. (If you're wondering how much went to tax cuts, that figure is around 40%).
How was texas so successful while refusing this temporary windfall? I don't know, but they definitely didn't refuse anything. Rick Perry made a bunch of noise, got his headlines, convinced you that he's a true believer and then took the money.
The weatherization project you got about right, although those studies finished on schedule a month ago or so.. that was a stupid provision and they should have eliminated it, they probably didn't realize it would lead to a bureaucratic snafu.
Hopefully, what Mr. Tufte will show us, are some very compelling and illustrative graphs that do a good job of explaining where the money went. There seems to be some confusion abounding, especially on the tax cut part.
EDIT: A further hope I have is that people who normally respect things like statistics, figures and Mr Tufte don't immediately do a 180 and disown the guy if he doesn't produce a pie chart of the stimulus money that says "100% = SOCIALISM"
For you to be right about no state aid and there being no strings attached, you'd need to explain why there was all that furor about the governors of Texas and one of the Carolinas (I think) refusing the aid, and the provision in law to bypass a governor, and how the governor of Florida's figurative and literal embrace of Obama is helping to destroy his campaign for Senator.
WRT to tax cuts, putting the annual relief ($70 billion this year) for the not inflation indexed Alternative Minimum Tax into the stimulus was pure political theater.
And I just can't see how Perry "took" the Texas share of the remaining $167 billion in individual tax cuts (perhaps he should have instituted a state income tax to capture that "windfall" for the state???) or how he "took" the Texas share of $51 billion in business tax cuts, but I don't know anything about Texas business taxes.
Anyway, I don't need to see graphs to get a rough idea from the listed breakdowns at Wikipedia or any of the other zillions of sites.
I thought conservatives would eat that up? Between that and the tax cuts, I can see how the party-over-substance crowd would have a big problem with this guy actually documenting where the money went. It's a lot easier to just shout "socialism!" than to talk about the numbers.
Regarding aid "to states to shore up their budgets", there was precisely zero, funding unemployment benefits and medicaid is not grant money going to states, it passes straight through to the recipients. There was originally a big item that involved the federal government contributing to state budgets in order to forestall state layoffs for a year, which I thought would be a great example of counter-cyclical spending. Unfortunately, it also made great hay for those who wanted to attack the bill in general as "big spending", so it got jettisoned. That's what I was referring to, not pass-through expenditures like medicaid, unemployment, etc.
Again, watch for the attached strings, which I've read include a Federal curriculum. And we've yet to see if these programs actually make it in the face of union opposition. Last time I checked 1/5 of the members of any given Democratic presidential nominating caucus are unionized teachers, and the shutdown of the D.C. voucher program, the one that provides among other things scholarships to the school Obama's children go to, does not inspire confidence.
Conservatives don't think much of temporary tax cuts, you only get changes in behavior with permanent changes in fiscal policy (and as for permanent 1-1.5 trillion dollar deficits...). People just pocket one time a few hundred dollar things like the Bush stimulus or this.
And we have a tendency to ask, "Is this worth the price?" You have to look at both sides of the ledger.
While unemployment and Medicaid may be "pass-through" in terms of mechanism, the fact remains that the states are on the hook for most of that money anyway and would have had to pay it out if not for this temporary Federal windfall.
PS Regarding policy changes to help the bottom line... you've seen those projected deficit numbers right? Two questions:
1) Do you think those projected deficits are the result of Obama administration policy (about 3 months old at the time I first saw the chart), or because of underlying fundamentals?
2) If you had to guess at the fastest rising cost in government spending, would you guess healthcare?
3) Ok fine, one more but I can't resist, if Obama said "I'm not pursuing a tax cut, I'm prioritizing healthcare reform because it will save the government a ton of money", how do you think the conservative reaction would go? :)
1. Obama administration policy. There's no limit to how fast a politician can spend money ^_^. (Well, to authorize the spending of money; as we've seen with the stimulus bill there's no limit to the amount of red tape a bureaucrat can then use to tie up a process.)
2. Yes.
3. Unfavorable, since we don't believe that the ends justify the means and we don't believe him on costs. The CBO doesn't believe him, and that's not counting the "savings" achieved by gutting Medicare, which will of course be repealed in due course or "adjusted" every year as is already done for Medicare payments to doctors.
There's exactly one time when the government should make a point of counter-cyclical deficit spending -- when in a recession. This is in pretty much every economics textbook, including the one by Greg Mankiw (Bush's chief economics adviser) that I read in college.
What we saw however, was that according to Dick Cheney, "Deficits don't matter [as long as a republican is in office]", then as soon as a democrat is in office, deficit spending during the worst financial meltdown in recent history is against economic fundamentals all of a sudden.
On healthcare.. I don't even know where to start, whether it's with your total refusal to acknowledge that we should focus on dollar-driven solutions ("I don't believe the ends justify the means"), or your incoherent philosophy "I don't believe in government financed healthcare in general EXCEPT for medicare, in which case I'll accuse you of 'gutting' it."
At the end of the day, we have a huge budget hole as a result of skyrocketing medical costs. I spent 3 years in local government laying off teachers and feeling like shit about it because of those costs. Forgive me if I value those teachers' paychecks and the kids' education over abstract ideals about what is socialism, what isn't, and how something can only be a good idea if a republican proposes it.
I can be reasonably assured that no such thing will happen to me, so all I can hope for is that Tufte holds himself to the same ideal.
Did Obama just hire a very talented propagandist, or a guy who deftly presents the bill's inadequacies? I guess we'll find out. Either way, his presentation will certainly be the anchor point of the stimulus debate.
Why's it have to be either/or? My side/your side?
I'd hope, and I bet this is what Obama's hoping too, that the guy will produce some stuff that is very reflective of WHAT'S IN THE DAMN BILL. Obama stands to gain politically from public understanding of the bill because frankly, as long as the graphic doesn't consist of "$$$ -> (hammer&sickle)", it'll be better press than the thing's gotten so far. The truth is worth something.
The bill is a whole lot of things and none of them are black and white -- quantifying them in a way that's more educational than "they're gonna start death panels", "socialism", blah blah is difficult and Obama clearly feels he stands to gain from public education here.
For example, the stimulus was 40% tax cuts. Now, given that 99% of the republican party voted against it and called it socialism or whatever, you probably wouldn't think that. But it's true. Education helps, when you've made an honest effort at good policy. It's not just propaganda.
What it means every time a jihadist in Pakistan is notified that "You've got missile."
The benefits of keeping the sea lanes open and free. Bonus points for tracking the historical effects of more and less vigorous suppression of piracy.
How beneficial it has been to keep Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, etc. free in the post-WWII era. Bonus points for comparing their respective increases in economic and political freedom with their climbs up the value chain. A special study of Singapore could be fascinating ("Disneyland with the death penalty").
Etc.
'How beneficial it has been to keep Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, etc. free in the post-WWII era. Bonus points for comparing their respective increases in economic and political freedom with their climbs up the value chain. A special study of Singapore could be fascinating ("Disneyland with the death penalty").'
These are terrific, difficult, and important questions.
Are there freely available Web sites, perhaps along the lines of Wikipedia[0], for articles that try to explain correlation and side-effects of assorted facts and events?
[0] I have mixed thoughts on Wikipedia. I've read enough articles with unsubstantiated opinion pushing either a commercial or ideological point view to be deeply skeptical of the site. But the general idea of having some quasi-moderated place for deeper observations beyond fact-reporting is appealing.