Lord help me, but I read a Wall Street Journal op-ed last night. I keep promising myself never to do this, but sometimes I backslide. The topic of last night's piece was "Welfare Is What’s Eating the Budget."
It was co-authored by Phil Gramm—remember him?—and it was odd even by Journal standards. It contained a blizzard of statistical claims but not a single one was sourced to anything. Here are three of them:
- Means-tested social-welfare spending totaled $1.6 trillion in 2023.
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This is only the case if you use pandemic-level figures, which were temporary and highly inflated. According to the OMB, social welfare spending in 2019 came to about $1.1 trillion. Half of that was Medicaid and the other half was everything else. - Since funding for the War on Poverty ramped up in 1967, welfare payments received by the average work-age household in the bottom quintile of income recipients has risen from $7,352 in inflation-adjusted 2022 dollars to $64,700 in 2022.
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Gramm is seriously claiming that poor households in the US, on average, receive $64,700 in welfare benefits? The Congressional Budget Office puts it at $16,300 in 2019. - With the explosion of means-tested transfer payments, the portion of prime work-age persons in the bottom quintile who actually work has fallen to 36% from 68%.
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I have no idea where Gramm got this. According to the CBPP, the share of low-income people who work has been steadily between 60-70% for half a century. Other research supports this.
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The Journal editorial page is like Donald Trump: it lies baldly all the time. Usually, though, they're a bit more sophisticated about it. They at least pretend they get their numbers from somewhere. Gramm doesn't even bother.
As usual with these things, what's really odd is that you can use real numbers and still make your case that social welfare spending has increased a lot (it has) and that cutting it should be part of tackling the deficit (I don't agree, but the numbers are large enough to be meaningful). But that's never enough for these guys.
It seems to me like it should be a basic responsibility of any opinion writer to be willing to respond to criticism. If you have a WSJ subscription, you should post KD's blog entry in full to the reporter, the editorial staff and the ombudsperson, if any, and expect a reasonable response.
My spouse bought me that serta sheep.
reuters (fwiw):
Harris leads Trump 47% to 42% in Reuters/Ipsos poll
The poll surveyed 1,690 U.S. adults nationwide, including 1,405 registered voters. It had a margin of error of around three percentage points for registered voters.
Sometimes I wonder why ~ 50% of the population find Trump credible. Then I remember WSJ and AEI and the right-wing echo chamber.
WSJ and AEI don't reach a majority of that 50% directly. But Fox News does. Constantly. Repeatedly.
The basic cable package from my cable company comes with Fox News. I think that's one of the reasons why so many people watch it. I got rid of cable more than a decade ago. Though you couldn't pay me to watch Fox Entertainment.
I remember when the Journal was (a) a highly regarded source for financial news and analysis, and (b) an example of good journalistic practices.
I also remember when my grandparents were alive, and used to send me birthday cards with money in them. Now I'm over 80. All those things were a long time ago.
Nostalgia ... it ain't what it used to be!
The WSJ was indeed once a reputable newspaper. EXCEPT for the editorial page - even in the 1980s, it was cesspit. My brother's thesis advisor was embroiled in one of their witch hunts, and the examples of their mendacity were legion and egregious.
The news section was respected, but even its height the editorial page was a joke,
There was an old line, something like: the news sections tell business execs what they need to know, the editorial pages tells them what they want to hear.
A very high up person in Warren Buffett's office told me that the editorial section of the WSJ was their version of the cartoon section found in all other media, at the time.
My sister and I send each other a few dollars in birthday cards to remember our grandmother who used to do the same when she was a live. When we visited her she’d sneak us $2 “for a cup of coffee.” We miss that.
Gramm says that these people are getting money like it’s a bad thing. What does he think happens to that money? They don’t stuff it in a mattress or buy bonds like the rich do. They recycle it immediately back into the economy where it stimulates all the businesses the WSJ loves.
He sounds like Scrooge being worried that the debtors prisons might have closed.
The editorial page of the WSJ lacks editorialized content; it's a landscape of unedited, unreviewed, untouched blathering. IOW, yes, it's just like Donald Trump.
It looks to me like the same tidal wave of whatever fills up Fox News is also filling up the Wall Street Journal.
Don't let any of it spill onto you.
Who could forget Phil "I own more shotguns than I need. But less shotguns than I want." Gramm?
That's certainly one of the things I remember. Another is a piece by an economist who had looked at his dissertation and that of his wife (also in econ). As I recall, the author's view was that Phil's was (even for the time) old-fashioned and rather marginal, while Wendy's was pretty good.
It's the Donald Trump effect. If he can lie and get away with it so can they.
Good lord. Gramm is a completely dishonest hack, but we already knew that. Who tf edited this steaming pile?
One wonders how long our inability to even consider (I mean, the WSJ could easily consider some other "conservative" country) what other first world countries do, and what they get for their spending will continue.
I mean, we are talking about a government, right? Shouldn't like 100% of spending be "social welfare spending?" 🙂 I mean, health care is "social welfare spending" in the rest of the first world, so the thought that "the poor" shouldn't get it as they are lazy or something is as ridiculous as Hatians eating cats when in comes right down to it.
Not trying to be funny, its just that the WSJ I suppose, thinks that there really ought to be zero spending as their baseline. Which would be a ridiculous notion in the rest of the First World and most of the Second World.
we need to spend more on welfare -- https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/12/climate/thomas-piketty-ineuqality-climate-change.html
Phil Gramm is still alive?
Wow I hadn’t heard his name in so long I just assumed he’d died years ago.
A drinking habit is probably healthier.
That's because at least the smarter ones know that the real figures for social welfare payments don't scare normal people, so they have to lie to get the reaction they're looking for.
Just a thumbnail-version of the issues with the larger Republican agenda - a large majority of the country really does not wish to live as serfs in an unaccountable authoritarian-theocratic kleptocracy. As they get more desperate, they get more absurd.
So the problem is that old people in nursing homes run out of personal savings before they die, and the solution is to make sure poor younger people starve.
I think the way they got $64,000 per household is by dividing $1.6 triillion by 25 million households. But ... that's not really how any of this works.
The disgusting thing about it is they know that. But like Donald Trump said. "People will just believe you. You just tell them and they believe you,” Which is Fox Entertainments unofficial motto.
Phil "I've got awl the munney in the werld" Gramm? The guy who spent more dollars per vote than any other presidential candidate in history? And not by a little bit either.
Yeah. I trust him.
I used to know someone who tried to tell me a figure like that $64,000 by saying that a family on welfare got health insurance valued at $15,000 a year, and a rental subsidy for another amount, and food stamps, etc., in addition to the cash allotment to come up with some overstated amount. Anyway, I no longer see that person.