More extremism debunked

[Pangloss]

Was about to hit the sack when I ran across this little gem from Ben Cohen, co-founder of Ben & Jerry's ice cream:

 

"Because of all the National Guard troops and equipment that we sent over to Iraq, and because of the budget cuts that we made in terms of rebuilding the levies in New Orleans in order to pay for the war in Iraq, we've ended up with a lot more casualties than we should have had due to Hurricane Katrina."

 

There are so many things wrong with this statement that I hardly know where to begin!

 

- Okay, funding was "cut", but only in the sense that one amount was asked for during the budget process and another amount was provided (in 2001 and 2004). Isn't that how budgets always work, with too much being asked for and not enough being given? So what? Clinton did the same thing, which makes you wonder what Cohen's motivations are, but then he's a well-known ABB guy. But more to the point, the Corps of Engineers doesn't think it would have many any difference! Source: http://www.factcheck.org/article344.html

 

- No cuts were made *anywhere* in the budget to pay for the war in Iraq. In fact spending has *increased*. For that matter, so has income tax revenues, just not as fast as spending. (Which is why we have a deficit.)

 

- WHAT impact on the National Guard? More National Guard troops are in Louisiana than are in all of Iraq! http://www.factcheck.org/article348.html

 

I agree there might have been some impact on the immediate availability of Louisiana troops, and we should look further into that, but he's clearly trying to suggest something far more serious.

 

Just not seeing any connection here, ice cream boy. But hey, as long as you're holding the scoop, I'll take a double scoop of cookie dough, please! And make it snappy!

[budullewraagh]

what's funny is that people will believe that because it makes sense- if you spend money on iraq, you aren't spending said money here in the us. bush usurped the presidency for two consecutive terms because of similar bs

[Severian]

Are you implying that the situation in New Orleans wasn't a complete shambles and utter disgrace? Or are you just surprised that an ice-cream salesman doesn't know much about how political budgets work?

[Pangloss]

Well okay Bud, if you start from the assumption that we *should* spend more than we take in, and that we *should* be spending far more than we currently are, then yeah, it makes a lot of sense.

 

Sev, I said nothing of the kind.

[swansont]

- No cuts were made *anywhere* in the budget to pay for the war in Iraq.

 

This is not true, unless you are just dealing with semantics. Plenty of money was reprogrammed - i.e. not spent on what was originally intended, in order to pay for war-related items. Last summer my command's budget was cut by about 5% of the overall value so that the money could be used elsewhere. When you view that as a fraction of discretionary spending (i.e if you assume you are going to actually pay salaries to your employees) it was a much higher fraction. Since it happened after mid-year, there was a real question as to whether furloughs would be required. All travel and purchasing of equipment was turned off until we were able to beg and borrow money elsewhere in the DoD to function (I am under the impression that we repaid some of that in this past fiscal year, though I am not privy to those details)

 

Further, we were just recently informed that facilities management budgets are to be funneled off to the Katrina rebuilding effort. The tone was that unless it's an emergency, it's not going to get fixed. No preventetive maintenance. Certain contracts (like cell phones) will be allowed to lapse when they expire, and since the new fiscal year just started, I imagine that a lot of that is happening immediately. So infrastructure elsewhere will suffer without any "cuts" happening.

 

Just because the cuts were not transparent to the outside observer doesn't mean they haven't been made.

[Pangloss]

That's interesting, but does it seem likely that that's the kind of subtle point that Cohen was talking about? That his purpose is to get at the truth, no matter what that truth might be, through careful and thoughtful analysis of the facts?

 

Yeah, me neither.

 

It's worth noting that the next question from the reporter in this interview was "Is there anything that Bush has done that you approved of?", to which Cohen responded with a startled stammer and then a few mumbled words about (ironically) No Child Left Behind.

 

Demogogues always start with a grain of truth. Or at least something they can pass off as such.

 

At any rate, I think that what you mentioned above interesting and I'd like to hear more about it. As I said in the other thread, it does seem logical to speculate that guard deployment in Iraq has had some kind of impact on guard preparedness in specific areas here at home. I want to know, for example, why Louisiana only had 6,000 troops available, and why (a) no more were requested by the governor, and (b) nobody at the Pentagon saw that as being too small a number to handle any emergencies that might crop up anywhere in the state. What analysis contributed to that decision? What kind of number should have been available? What other kinds of preparations could have been made that were not, and why not? (And it's worth noting that while some of the changes these questions suggest do involve spending more of my tax dollars, they don't involve the kind of vast hundreds of billions that are being tossed about these days. I really hate that everyone's talking about throwing money at the problem without trying to figure out whether the system is able to even do the job.)

 

Anyway, these are important points, and as such they require thoughtful, objective investigation, not grandstanding demogoguery.

[bascule]

I'm having trouble turning up a source for that quote on Google...

[Pangloss]

You're not likely to. I paused it on my Tivo and copied it down verbatim on my laptop.

[Ophiolite]

Pangloss, with no intention of giving offense, but a concern that I shall, it seems to me that your effective definition of a demagogue is someone who passionately believes in a view different from your own and actively promotes it.

[Pangloss]

No offense taken, but that's an odd thing to say, given that I'm on the same side of the War in Iraq issue as Ben Cohen, and that I've also stated that I thought the federal government responded poorly to Katrina. Are you sure the problem you have with my statements above isn't really the fact that I'm much more reasonable and fair-minded in my criticism than Ben Cohen?

 

On a general level (which is where your question lies), the problem I have with demogoguery isn't the demogogues "view", it's their deception and spin. If deception and spin are wrong, as demogogues are so fond of saying about their opponents, then they're wrong everywhere, and I'm going to blast them for it whether I agree with their view or not.

 

If you think it's okay to lie and deceive, and you call that "actively promoting", well I guess if that works for you, more power to you (and I don't mean that sarcastically, I just think some people are incapable of seeing their ideologies in any kind of negative light -- everyone has their flaws). But it doesn't work for me, and I'll do something about it so long as I have the opportunity and the freedom to do so.

[budullewraagh]

"Well okay Bud, if you start from the assumption that we *should* spend more than we take in, and that we *should* be spending far more than we currently are, then yeah, it makes a lot of sense."

 

could you explain how this relates to what i was going at? i was saying that people will believe what makes sense to them, regardless of how true it is. for example, if you say that somebody drove for an hour and went 80 miles and asked an average person how fast this person was going 30 minutes into the trip, they'd probably give the answer "80m/h," which isn't necessarily true at all. but hey, it makes sense, so why use calculus? people believe that there is a certain limit to the amount of money the us can and will spend and that therefore if you increase spending on something, you decrease spending on other things. in a sense, it's true. so you have iraq and new orleans comes up. you need to borrow an extra, say, $100 billion for new orleans. you're taking $100 billion away from iraq, even though you didnt have that money until new orleans happened. and so, if you are spending, say, $500 billion on iraq, you arent spending it on new orleans, and thus are taking from new orleans, even though you theoretically could get more loans, etc. but again, the public isnt necessarily educated and wont necessarily be thoroughly informed

[Pangloss]

Are you saying that I should be more tolerant of misinformed and misleading analysis?

[budullewraagh]

absolutely not. i am saying that you should understand where the misinformed opinions of others come from if you are to eliminate ignorance.

[Pangloss]

Sure, that makes sense.