[Vision2020] The Wonk Gap

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

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September 8, 2013
The Wonk Gap By PAUL
KRUGMAN<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/paulkrugman/index.html>

On Saturday, Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming delivered the weekly Republican
address<http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/weekly-gop-address-makes-no-mention-of-syria?ref=fpb>.
He ignored Syria, presumably because his party is deeply conflicted on the
issue. (For the record, so am I.) Instead, he demanded repeal of the
Affordable Care Act. “The health care law,” he declared, “has proven to be
unpopular, unworkable and unaffordable,” and he predicted “sticker shock”
in the months ahead.

So, another week, another denunciation of Obamacare. Who cares? But Mr.
Barrasso’s remarks were actually interesting, although not in the way he
intended. You see, all the recent news on health costs has been good. So
Mr. Barrasso is predicting sticker shock precisely when serious fears of
such a shock are fading fast. Why would he do that?

Well, one likely answer is that he hasn’t heard any of the good news. Think
about it: Who would tell him?

My guess, in other words, was that Mr. Barrasso was inadvertently
illustrating the widening “wonk
gap<http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2012_05/the_wonk_gap037563.php>”
— the G.O.P.’s near-complete lack of expertise on anything substantive.
Health care is the most prominent example, but the dumbing down extends
across the spectrum, from budget issues to national security to poll
analysis. Remember, Mitt Romney and much of his party went into Election
Day expecting victory<http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57547239/adviser-romney-shellshocked-by-loss/>.


About health reform: Mr. Barrasso was wrong about everything, even the
“unpopular” bit, as I’ll explain in a minute. Mainly, however, he was
completely missing the story on affordability.

For the truth is that the good news on costs just keeps coming in. There
has been a striking slowdown in overall health
costs<http://thinkprogress.org/health/2013/08/20/2498391/growth-in-health-care-costs-continues-to-decrease-since-passage-of-obamacare/>since
the Affordable Care Act was enacted, with many experts giving the law
at least partial credit. And we now have a good idea what insurance
premiums will be once the law goes fully into effect; a comprehensive survey
by the Kaiser Family
Foundation<http://kaiserfamilyfoundation.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/early-look-at-premiums-and-participation-in-marketplaces.pdf>finds
that on average premiums will be significantly lower than those
predicted by the Congressional Budget Office when the law was passed.

But do Republican politicians know any of this? Not if they’re listening to
conservative “experts,” who have been offering a steady stream of
misinformation. All those claims about sticker
shock<http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/06/01/the-shocking-truth-about-obamacares-rate-shock/>,
for example, come from obviously misleading comparisons. For example,
supposed experts compare average insurance rates under the new system,
which will cover everyone, with the rates currently paid by a handful of
young, healthy people for bare-bones insurance. And they conveniently
ignore the subsidies many Americans will receive.

At the same time, in an echo of the Romney camp’s polling fantasies, other
conservative “experts” are creating false impressions about public opinion.
Just after Kaiser released a
poll<http://kff.org/health-reform/poll-finding/kaiser-health-tracking-poll-august-2013/>showing
a strong majority — 57 percent — opposed to the idea of defunding
health reform, the Heritage Foundation put out a poster claiming that 57
percent<http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2013/08/heritages-fun-with-defund-obamacare-polling-numbers.php>of
Americans want reform defunded. Did the experts at Heritage simply
read
the numbers upside down? No, they claimed, they were referring to some
other poll. Whatever really happened, the practical effect was to delude
the right-wing faithful.

And the point is that episodes like this have become the rule, not the
exception, on the right. How many Republicans know, for example, that
government employment has declined, not risen, under President Obama?
Certainly Senator Rand Paul was incredulous when I pointed this out to him
on TV<http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/09/09/816761/flabbergasted-rand-paul-learns-public-employment-decreased-under-obama/>last
fall. On the contrary, he insisted, “the size of growth of government
is enormous under President Obama” — which was completely untrue but was
presumably what his sources had told him, knowing that it was what he
wanted to hear.

For that, surely, is what the wonk gap is all about. Political conservatism
and serious policy analysis can coexist, and there was a time when they
did. Back in the 1980s, after all, health experts at Heritage made a
good-faith effort to devise a
plan<http://tv.msnbc.com/2013/08/21/obamacare-the-heritage-foundation-disowns-its-baby/>for
universal health coverage — and what they came up with was the system
now known as Obamacare.

But that was then. Modern conservatism has become a sort of cult, very much
given to conspiracy theorizing when confronted with inconvenient facts.
Liberal policies were supposed to cause hyperinflation, so low measured
inflation<http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/05/01/sticker-shock.html>must
reflect statistical fraud; the threat of climate change implies the
need for public action, so global warming must be a gigantic
scientific hoax<http://www.politico.com/blogs/burns-haberman/2012/02/santorum-i-never-believed-global-warming-hoax-113739.html>.
Oh, and Mitt Romney would have won if only he had been a real conservative.

It’s all kind of funny, in a way. Unfortunately, however, this runaway cult
controls the House, which gives it immense destructive power — the power,
for example, to wreak havoc on the economy by refusing to raise the debt
ceiling. And it’s disturbing to realize that this power rests in the hands
of men who, thanks to the wonk gap, quite literally have no idea what
they’re doing.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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