A Reality Check (and a Little Civics Lesson)

Greetings from the Left Coast! The 2008 Presidential campaign is heating up, and, to no one's surprise, every candidate is going on record as the candidate for "change." That's what we all want, right? If as many people as the pollsters claim believe that the country is headed in the wrong direction, then of course we would want change! And of course all of the candidates will tell us what we want to hear.

But just how much change can a President actually cause? No matter whom he or she may be? What, in fact, can a President do? Well, that's fairly clearly defined in this thing called the Constitution of the United States. According to Article Two, here's what a President can do:

• He or she is the Commander in Chief of the nation's military forces. That means that once Congress authorizes military action, the President gets to make the decision of how the troops get deployed. The Founding Fathers knew that you can't run a war by committee. Someone must have the ultimate decision-making responsibility. That someone is the President.
• He or she "may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices." This phrase contains the seeds of what has become the "Cabinet," made up of the heads of the various departments that compose the Executive Branch of government.
• He or she may grant pardons and reprieves, except in cases of impeachment.
• He or she may make treaties, provided that two-thirds of the Senate ratifies them.
• He or she "shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the Supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law..." (The article goes on to say that Congress may determine by law whether certain other appointments are made by the President, by courts of law, or by "Heads of Departments.")
• He or she has the power to make appointments to fill vacancies "that may happen during the Recess of the Senate," but these appointments expire at the end of the Senate's next session, unless the Senate votes to confirm them permanently.
• He or she "shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient."
• He or she may call special sessions of either or both Houses of Congress when necessary.
• He or she "shall receive Ambassadors and other public Ministers."
• He or she "shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." (This is what takes up most of the time and effort of the Executive Branch.)
• He or she "shall Commission all the Officers of the United States."

That's it, folks. According to the Constitution, that's what the President gets to do. So keep that in mind when you're listening to campaign promises, such as:

Vote for me so we can end our dependence on foreign oil. Really? How is a sitting President going to do that? The Bush administration hasn't done it in the last seven years. And, guess what? The Clinton administration didn't do it in the eight years before that, either. (And if we have another Clinton administration, they won't do it either.) And it wasn't because it didn't need to be done - it was because the President can't do it. The President only gets to execute the laws that Congress passes, and no President in recent memory has ever gotten things entirely his own way...not even when his own party controlled Congress.

There are only two ways to end our dependence on foreign oil. Either increase our domestic supplies, or reduce demand. But we can't easily increase our domestic supplies, because environmental interest groups have managed to block every attempt at new drilling, or new refineries (we haven't built a new refinery in 30 years, which is why prices ratchet up every time one shuts down for maintenance). And how, exactly, would you suggest that we reduce demand? Increased mileage standards are a mere drop in the barrel. Let's see a show of hands from everyone who wants to see additional taxes of a buck or two a gallon so we can depress demand for gasoline by artificially raising the price. Anybody? How about some windfall profit taxes on the oil companies? Boy, that'll show them! But will it produce one extra drop of oil?

The best way to end our dependence on foreign oil is to let the free market do it. We're actually fortunate that the recent run-up in oil prices has happened at a time when the economy was so strong that we've been able to absorb it without having the economy go completely into the toilet. Do you realize just how remarkable that is? And does George Bush get any credit for the resilience the economy has shown? Of course not. But the higher prices go, the more price competitive alternate sources of energy become: biofuels, fuel cells, gas/electric hybrids - and the more affordable it becomes to use more expensive extraction methods to get oil from shale deposits, tar sands, and existing wells where all the oil that could be easily extracted has already been extracted. Market forces will work if they're allowed to - and I'd rather bet on them than bet on the government to solve the problem.

How about "climate change?" (This is the new term for what used to be called "global warming," now that the evidence is mounting that "global warming," at least of the man-made variety, is a gigantic hoax.) Both Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton support the Kyoto Treaty...but back when Bill was President, the Senate (that would be the Democrat-controlled Senate) voted 98 - 0 to reject it. See, it costs the candidates nothing to tell you they support that treaty - because they know that there aren't enough Senators who are willing to commit economic suicide to ratify it.

Fiscal responsibility? Well, the President gets to submit a budget to Congress, but Congress then immediately gets to start stuffing it full of pork. Remember how the Democrats promised to eliminate "earmarks" if only we'd give them control of the House in 2006? Guess how that worked out? According to a December, 2007, article in USA Today, all 49 new Democrat legislators sponsored or co-sponsored at least one earmark. According to the article, "Freshmen Democrats were the sole sponsors on projects worth $351 million." Republicans, by contrast, only got $65 million approved. Those Democrat reformers are responsible for six times as much pork as the Republicans they criticized. What the Democrats have done is make more of an effort to hide what they're doing: rather than inserting earmarks into legislation as it's being written, they've decided to allow them to be inserted into conference reports, which are not publicly negotiated, and which cannot be further amended when they reach the House or Senate floor for a vote. I guess this is a new definition of reform that I wasn't previously familiar with.

And remember, the President doesn't have the "line-item veto" power that many state governors have. He or she can't just strike out offending portions of appropriations bills - it's a take it or leave it situation, which is why defense appropriations bills are such rich targets for the insertion of non-defense-related earmarks. (E.g., $24 million for sugar beets, and $40 million for something called the "Tree Assistance Program," inserted into the Iraq funding bill last spring.) And the Supreme Court has held that, in general, the President can't refuse to spend what Congress has appropriated, either, because that would amount to a de facto line-item veto, which is unconstitutional.

How about reforming the Income Tax code? Moving to a "flat tax" or a "fair tax?" Believe me, I'd love to see that happen, but, again, the President can't just do it. According to that pesky old Constitution, Congress - specifically the House of Representatives - gets to write the tax laws. The President can ask Congress to do what he or she wants, but can't make them do it.

The Founding Fathers were amazingly smart in how they designed this government. Congress is composed of two Houses. The House of Representatives is, by intent, the voice of the people. Its members are apportioned according to population, with the more populous states getting more seats in the House. And every seat in the House is up for grabs every two years, so it responds very quickly to the desires of the people - if the Representatives aren't doing what the people want, the makeup of the House can be changed very quickly. The Senate, on the other hand, is the voice of caution, tradition, and deliberation. Every state gets two Senators, regardless of how large or small it may be. Senators are elected for six-year terms, and only one-third of the seats are up for grabs in any given two-year election cycle. In fact, until the Seventeenth Amendment was ratified in 1913, Senators weren't even elected directly by the people - they were appointed by the legislators of their respectives states. The Senate is, by intent, the voice of continuity, the counterweight to the potential volatility of the House, the voice that says, "Wait a minute, let's think this over first."

The need for compromise was deliberately built into our system of government by its architects. No one branch of government, no one person, no one President can deliver on most of the things you're going to hear about this campaign season. So what should you be voting on? I'd suggest that we should choose a Commander in Chief that would be an effective leader of, and would command the respect of, our nation's military. Someone whose foreign policy you trust, seeing as how they do get to appoint ambassadors and tell them what to say. Someone who has proven his or her ability to manage large budgets effectively, since the President is responsible for spending (and managing) the money that Congress appropriates. Someone who has the ability to inspire others to follow him or her, since the promised changes aren't going to be things that can just be rammed down Congress' collective throat.

But, please, don't believe everything you hear. And thanks for listening.

A Left Coast Book Review - Conservatives Without Conscience

Greetings from the Left Coast! Some weeks ago, my wife and I met with some dear family friends down in Tacoma whom we hadn’t seen socially for quite some time. I made the mistake, before my wife kicked me under the table, of mentioning that I was now blogging, and confessed that my political leanings were “somewhere to the Right of Atilla the Hun,” if I recall my words correctly. I soon learned that their political leanings, um, weren’t. As we parted, they handed me John Dean’s 2006 bestseller, Conservatives Without Conscience, and suggested that I would find it enlightening, as it came from someone who was within the Conservative camp, as it were.

In case you don’t remember John Dean, he was the White House legal counsel to President Richard Nixon when the Watergate scandal broke. The FBI referred to him as the “master manipulator of the cover up.” On November 30, 1973, he pled guilty to obstruction of justice and was sentenced to one to four years in a minimum-security prison. He never served that sentence, however – he instead became a star witness for the prosecution, and was held in a special “safe house,” when he wasn’t working with the Watergate Special Prosecutor and testifying in the trial of other Watergate figures. On January 8, 1975, in return for his cooperation, Judge John Sirica reduced his sentence to time served.

Now, that in itself doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have good ideas, or that we shouldn’t pay attention to what he has to say. He paid his debt to society, and is entitled to make a living like anybody else. Personally, I haven’t been following his career of late, but he has apparently been doing very well for himself writing a series of books that are critical of today’s Republicans in general and the Bush administration in particular. According to Wikipedia, he has frequently been a guest on Keith Olbermann’s MSNBC show, as well as on the Randi Rhodes Show on the Air America radio network. Since I don’t listen to either MSNBC or Air America, I’ll take their word for it…but I will say that those are venues that aren’t known for giving air time to conservatives.

I found the book disappointing, and somewhat difficult to read. Certainly John Dean has some valid beefs against certain self-styled “conservatives.” The allegations leveled at Dean and his wife by Leonard Colodny and Robert Gettlin in their book Silent Coup: The Removal of a President are truly despicable. I also suspect there just may have been some hard feelings toward Dean on the part of the people he helped send to prison. But that’s no excuse for deliberate distortions in his own works.

Dean spends a lot of time in this book talking about the psychological profile of “Authoritarians,” and explaining why, especially if they are “Social Dominators,” it’s dangerous to have them in power. (And I do mean a lot of time – there were times it felt like I was reading a psychology textbook.) What he doesn’t mention, because this is basically a Conservative Republican-bashing book, is that there are plenty of authoritarian personalities on both sides of the political aisle. In fact, it's arguable that an authoritarian personality is what drives most people to seek political office. And the most egregious examples of the suppression of rights these days – particularly the right of free speech – are coming from the left, not the right...but that's another post for another day.

Dean points out several cases of Republicans who were caught violating the law as examples of what he’s talking about. And, indeed, in the cases he mentions, these were people who betrayed the public trust, and got what they deserved. I’ve noticed something interesting, though: In general, when Republican politicians get caught with their hands in the proverbial cookie jar, their own constituents generally vote them out of office. When Democrats get caught, their constituents generally keep re-electing them. Here are just a few examples:

• Democrat Congressman Gerry Studds was censured by the House of Representatives in 1983 for his part in a Congressional page sex scandal. He admitted having a sexual relationship with a 17-year old male congressional page who, while a minor, was of the age of “legal consent” under state law. Studds was re-elected six more times after being censured. He defended his actions as having a “consensual relationship with a young adult.”
• Democrat Congressman William Jefferson was videotaped by the FBI on July 30, 2005, receiving $100,000 in a leather briefcase. On August 3, they raided his home in Washington DC, and found $90,000 wrapped in aluminum foil and stuffed in his freezer. He is alleged to have received over $400,000 in bribes from iGate, Inc., of Louisville, KY. In January, 2006, Brett Pfeffer, a former Jefferson aide who was on trial himself on bribery and conspiracy charges, implicated Jefferson in a corruption scheme involving an Internet company. In May, 2006, Vernon Jackson, the CEO of iGate, admitted to bribery of a public official. According to the Associated Press, the court documents made clear that Jefferson was the public official in question. That same month, Nancy Pelosi, then the House Minority Leader, publicly requested his immediate resignation from the House Ways and Means Committee (the primary tax-writing committee of the House). Jefferson refused. In June, 2006, House Democrats voted 99 to 58 to strip him of the committee assignment. That’s right: 58 other Democrats felt that it was appropriate, in spite of the evidence against him, for him to keep his seat on the committee whose primary responsibility is to figure out how the United States Government is going to fund its operations. Later that year, he was re-elected to his Congressional seat. (In June of 2007, a federal grand jury indicted him on 16 corruption-related charges.)
• Don’t even get me started on Ted Kennedy. Just Google “Chappaquiddick” and go from there.

Had any one of these examples featured a Republican, does anyone doubt that they would have been hounded from office with howls of outrage? But that’s OK. This is a book that was specifically written about the evils of Republicans, not Democrats. I get it. Unfortunately, Dean then goes off the rails and joins the standard chorus of criticism of the Bush administration: Bush is dumb; Cheney is evil; the U.S. tortures terrorist detainees; the pre-war intelligence was manipulated in a deliberate effort justify war in Iraq; we’re in danger of losing our rights because of the War on Terror - but he doesn't cite any hard evidence for any of these allegations. In terms of his intended audience, he's preaching to the choir - they already believe all these things, so evidence isn't required. That clearly can sell a lot of books, but I had hoped for more intellectual honesty from someone like Dean.

John Dean is clearly one of many intellectuals in our nation who live in a theoretical world. He actually seems to think that we shouldn’t be all that concerned about terrorism. After all, as he points out in his book, in 2001, when roughly 3,000 Americans were killed by terrorists, over 700,000 also died from heart disease, nearly 554,000 from cancer, and over 100,000 in various accidents. So, according to Dean, we need to keep the threat in perspective.

Gee, John, too bad you weren’t there at the World Trade Center with a bullhorn. You could have pointed out those statistics to the people who chose to jump out the windows rather than burn to death. I’m sure it would have comforted them on the way down to know that they were such an insignificant proportion of the country's total death toll for the year. (No, I haven’t gotten over 9/11. I never will. And neither should you. And, yes, I do get a little testy when I read or hear things that imply that it really wasn't that big of a deal.)

But the point is, it isn't the federal government's job to protect you from heart disease, cancer, or accidents (with a few obvious exceptions in the latter case, e.g., enforcing workplace safety laws). It is the federal government's job to protect you from people from other countries who want to destroy the nation's economy, bring down our government, and kill you. In fact, one could argue that this is the most important job the government has!

Dean also quotes Jim Harper of the Cato Institute, who compares the risk of terrorist attack to the Cold War, when the U.S. and the Soviet Union “drew within a few figurative seconds of midnight” in their nuclear stalemate. We “didn’t throw out the rulebook” then, and we shouldn’t do so now, either. This is a staggering display of ignorance of the enemy we face today. The U.S. and the Soviet Union avoided nuclear holocaust largely through the doctrine of “Mutually Assured Destruction” – the assurance that neither nation would be able to survive once the missiles started to fly. But the terrorists don’t have a nation to worry about. And they frankly don’t care how many people die in their pursuit of jihad. If they could get their hands on a nuclear weapon, and somehow get it into the U.S., they would use it without a moment’s concern about possible repercussions.

John Dean, and others like him, don’t really understand this. In their theoretical world, we shouldn’t ever use force unless it’s first used against us. Carried to its logical conclusion, that means they are willing to accept the possibility that we could lose an American city to a terrorist attack rather than take any kind of pre-emptive action to take the terrorists out before they have the chance to bring the fight back to our soil - but they don't see it that way, because they simply don’t take the threat seriously. And if you live in, say, a major port city that handles a lot of container freight, as my Tacoma friends do, that should worry you a lot more than whether we’re using coerced interrogation methods on detainees in Guantanamo.

Thanks for listening.

A Word About Intelligence

Greetings from the Left Coast! I recently saw an item in the local newspaper about the passing of Philip Agee, who died in Cuba on January 7 at age 72. What was he doing in Cuba? Well, his U.S. passport was revoked back in 1979, and he’s spent a lot of time in Cuba since then. According to Wikipedia, Agee ran the cubalinda.com Website from his home in Havana – a business that specialized in using “loopholes in American law to arrange holidays to Cuba for American citizens.”

You may not remember Philip Agee, but I do. Agee worked for the CIA during the 1960s and, after resigning from the CIA in 1968 (or being forced to resign for a variety of reasons, depending on who you talk to), went on to write a book entitled Inside the Company which was first published in Britain in 1975. Among other things, the book identified some 250 CIA officers and agents. Covers were blown, and people had to be pulled out of undercover positions that had been painstakingly constructed. Years of effort were destroyed. In 1978, Agee and a group of supporters started publishing the Covert Action Information Bulletin, the stated purpose of which was to promote “a worldwide campaign to destabilize the CIA through exposure of its operations and personnel.”

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, we’ve learned a lot of things from KGB records that have been made public, and former KGB agents and officials who have gone public with what they know. You probably haven’t heard a lot of coverage about this, because some of it is extremely embarrassing to those who cover the news – like the revelations that there really were Russian agents in this country who were manipulating the anti-war movement of the 1960s and 1970s. And we now know a lot more about Agee’s motivations as well.

According to Vasili Mitrokhin, Agee’s “bulletin” was supported by both the KGB and the Cuban General Intelligence Directorate. Oleg Kalugin, the former head of the KGB’s Counterintelligence Directorate, stated that Agee had approached the KGB in Mexico City in 1973, and been turned away, whereupon he “…went to the Cubans, who welcomed him with open arms…The Cubans shared Agee’s information with us.” In fact, talking about his 1975 book, Agee himself said, “Representatives of the Communist Party of Cuba also gave important encouragement at a time when I doubted that I would be able to find the additional information I needed.” Not surprisingly, his former CIA colleagues and U.S. officials called Agee a traitor. Agee, on the other hand, said he thought of himself as part of “the American tradition of dissent.” (Gee, where else have we heard that?)

Agee was never prosecuted in the United States. According to Vince Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism chief, this was because U.S. officials feared that a trial would expose Soviet defectors who were living here under new identities. This, by the way, illustrates one of the biggest reasons why terrorists we capture on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan should not be prosecuted in the U.S. civilian court system. Under the rules of evidence “discovery,” it would be impossible to effectively prosecute them without giving away crucial information on how we know what we know about them. But I digress.

Agee’s book hit the market in the midst of the “Church Committee” hearings of 1975-76 – a U.S. Senate committee chaired by Democratic Senator Frank Church of Idaho (who also sought the Democratic nomination for president in 1976). For a summary of the impact of the Church Committee, and subsequent Congressional restrictions on the operations of America’s intelligence agencies, I strongly recommend reading Congressional Oversight and the Crippling of the CIA, an excellent article by Stephen F. Knott, published by George Mason University’s History News Network. It says, in part:

“The damage done to the CIA by this congressional oversight regime is quite extensive. The committees increased the number of CIA officials subject to Senate confirmation, condemned the agency for its contacts with unscrupulous characters, prohibited any further contact with these bad characters, insisted that the United States not engage or assist in any coup which may harm a foreign leader, and overwhelmed the agency with interminable requests for briefings (some 600 alone in 1996)…The CIA was also a victim of the renowned congressional practice of pork barrel politics. The intelligence committees forced the agency to accept high priced technology that just happened to be manufactured in a committee member’s district…On some occasions, members of Congress threatened to leak information in order to derail covert operations they found personally repugnant.”

Now, the essence of “human intelligence” (a.k.a. spying), is either infiltrating your own people into the target organization, or convincing someone who is already part of it to pass information to you. While we might want to think that those whom we recruit have decided to work with us for altruistic reasons (because we are the good guys, after all, and they surely recognize the inherent superiority of the American way of life) - and indeed some do work for us for precisely that reason - you can’t always find someone who fits that description. You must then work with whomever you can find to get the intelligence you need. You might even have to (gasp!) pay money for it. And people who are willing to betray their country or (in the case of Al Qaeda) their comrades for money tend to be, by definition, “unscrupulous characters.” If you prohibit the CIA from working with them, you are, as my daddy used to say, cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Spying is a dirty, dangerous job. It often requires ruthless decisions and unscrupulous characters to get the job done. For most of human history, a spy who was caught faced immediate (and often spectacularly brutal, to discourage others) execution. But the intelligence gathered is indispensible. Information about your enemy is the most valuable weapon you can have in any kind of conflict. It can sometimes give you the leverage you need to defuse a situation without resorting to force. It can also help you spot the situations where armed conflict is going to be inevitable, and you might as well get it over with. And sometimes, in the real world, a surgical covert operation can save thousands of lives on both sides.

Henry Kissinger once said, in referring to the Church Committee, that it’s an illusion to believe that “tranquility can be achieved by an abstract purity of motive for which history offers no example.” Still, there are those who insist on living in a theoretical, idealistic world where, if we would just be nice to other people, they will naturally be nice to us in return. In 1974, seventeen Senators, including Senator Joe Biden (Democrat – Delaware), voted to ban all covert operations. During his 1988 presidential campaign, Biden proudly noted that he had threatened to “go public” with covert action plans during the Reagan administration, thus causing those operations to be canceled. (Judging from his recent statements, Biden hasn’t learned much in the last 30+ years, either.) Former Congressman Leo Ryan (Democrat – California) contended that leaks were an important tool. As Knott points out in his article, “Leaks have occurred repeatedly since the mid-1970s, and in very few cases has the offending party been disciplined.” (And Congress has the nerve to complain that they’re not fully briefed on every intelligence operation we conduct.)

Robert Ellsworth (former U.S. Ambassador to NATO, former Deputy Secretary of Defense, and former 3-term Republican Congressman from Kansas) said, referring to the Church Committee, “They were very specific about their effort to destroy American intelligence [capabilities].” That the committee did not succeed in dismantling the CIA and other intelligence organizations entirely was due largely to the efforts of Ellsworth and the much-maligned Donald Rumsfeld (in his first stint as Secretary of Defense under President Gerald Ford).

Over the years, the actions of a Democrat-controlled Congress, aided and abetted by the Carter and Clinton administrations, have cut the heart out of our “Human Intelligence” operations, and forced us to rely more and more on electronic intelligence. Presidents Reagan and Bush (the Elder) did their best to improve things - Bush, after all, had been Director of the CIA during the Ford administration, so he knew a few things about the business - but “human intelligence assets” take years to cultivate and very little time to destroy. And since we are often asking those “assets” to risk their lives to pass intelligence to us, once you’ve lost their trust, it’s really hard to get it back.

So we found ourselves on 9/11 wondering how our intelligence apparatus could have failed so miserably. And we find ourselves today faced with an enemy that knows not to use electronic communications channels that we can intercept – thanks in part to a helpful news media that’s only too glad to report on, for example, how intercepting satphone transmissions was helping us locate Al Qaeda members. (Guess what? They’ve stopped using satphones! What a surprise!) And this enemy is extremely difficult to infiltrate, because we have very few human intelligence assets who can pass themselves off as convincing Islamic jihadists. (Never mind the things they would probably be forced to do to “prove” themselves.) And the same politicians who were instrumental in putting us in this position are now blasting the intelligence community that they crippled because our intelligence is “flawed.”

But some of us are old enough to remember the 60s and 70s, and the Church Committee, and Philip Agee, and the Carter administration, and we know exactly why our intelligence community is in the situation it’s in today. And we’re not particularly excited about handing more political power to the party that’s largely responsible for it.

Thanks for listening.

But It's Really No Laughing Matter!

Greetings from the Left Coast - and Happy New Year!

A couple of weeks ago, when referring to the New York Sun article about discovering that Bill Clinton had blocked the release of some 2,600 documents from his presidency, when advisor Bruce Lindsey had said in a written statement, "Bill Clinton has not blocked the release of a single document," I made the comment that sometimes you just have to shake your head and laugh. But the fact is that it's really no laughing matter when politicians go out of their way to make statements that are technically true, but totally misleading.

A great example of this is the hand-wringing over "tax cuts for the rich" that I wrote about a couple of months ago. Since the "wealthy" pay the majority of the income tax that's collected (households making over $157,176 paid 58% of all income taxes collected in 2004), it would be impossible to have any kind of meaningful tax cut that wouldn't disproportionately favor those peolple - because they're paying a disproportionate amount of the tax! So, is it true that most tax cuts disproportionately favor the wealthy? Yes. Is that statement extremely misleading? Yes. And, by the way, these hand-wringers are the same people who don't think that allowing the "Bush tax cuts" to expire should count as a "tax increase," and will talk about a "reduction in government spending" when what they really mean is a reduction in the rate of increase in government spending.

Here's another one for you. As the campaign season progresses, expect to hear more and more from the Democratic candidates about the woes of the shrinking Middle Class in this country. This will, of course, happen against the media drumbeat of how we are facing an impending recession because of rising oil prices, a disappointing Christmas shopping season, and the subprime mortgage crisis. (And, before you take me to task over my media-bashing, please answer this: A recent Gallup poll found that 84% of Americans are satisfied with their personal lives, and 59% say they are "very satisfied." Yet only 27% were satisfied with the way things were going in the country as a whole. How can you explain that disparity other than to lay it at the feet of those in the media who, day in and day out, tell us how terrible things are going?)

Is the Middle Class shrinking? Yes, it is, depending on how you define "Middle Class." But the reason might surprise you. One definition of "Middle Class" is households making between $30,000 and $75,000 per year. In 1979, about 53% of American households fell into that category. Roughly 21% made less than $30,000 per year, and roughly 26% made more than $75,000. Between 1979 and 2004, the percentage of households making between $30,000 and $75,000 per year dropped by roughly 13%! Wow! But did they make less money? No - the percentage of households making between $75,000 and $100,000 per year went up by about 1%, and the percentage of households making over $100,000 per year went up by roughly 13%! The percentage of households making below $30,000 per year was basically unchanged.

(This information, by the way, was in an article by Stephen Rose that was published back in September, 2006, by The American Prospect, which is not a particularly conservative publication.)

So, is it true that the Middle Class (as defined above) is shrinking? Yes, it is. Is it also extremely misleading when used, as it usually is, to imply that Americans today are worse off than they were a few years ago? Yes.

And lest you think that the numbers are just being skewed by the dollar amounts involved, the median household income in 2004 for families beween the ages of 25 and 59 was $63,300. If you just consider married households, the median income jumped to roughly $70,000, and if you consider two-earner households, it was nearly $80,000.

"Median," by the way, means that there were just as many households above that number as there were below that number...which brings me to another point: Be very careful when you hear someone use the word "average." There are four different definitions of "average" - the "mean," the "median," the "mode," and the "midrange." Consider the following set of numbers: 2, 2, 3, 9, 15, 63, and 75.

• The "mean," or, more accurately, "arithmetic mean," is what most people think of when they hear the word "average." That means you add up the values and divide that total by the number of values in the set. So, for the example above, the "mean" would be 2 + 2 + 3 + 9 + 15 + 63 + 75 (which equals 169) divided by 7, because there were 7 numbers in the example. That works out to 24 point something.
• The "median" means the value in the set of numbers where there are just as many values higher as there are lower. So the median value of the set is 9, because there are three numbers in our example that are greater than 9, and three that are less than 9. The "median" is a good value to consider when looking at things like income distribution, as in the example above, because it gives you the "midpoint" of the range of values. (Before you ask, if there is an even number of values in the set, the median value is the mean of the middle two values.)
• The "mode" is the value that appears most frequently. So the mode of our example is 2, because the number 2 appears twice in the example, and all of the other numbers appear only once. If no value appears more than once, there is no mode, and if multiple values are duplicated, a mathemetician would say that the set is "multi-modal."
• The "midrange" is the arithmetic mean of the highest and lowest values in the set. So the midrange of our example would be (2 + 75)/2 = 38.5. This can be extremely misleading, because the term "midrange" would suggest that it refers to a value somewhere in the middle of the range of numbers, when in fact it can be even more skewed by extreme values than the arithmetic mean of the entire set, as we see in our example here.

So, a statistician could legitimately state that the "average" value of our example is either 2, 9, 24 or 38.5, and be literally correct. Now, when we're talking about a fairly small sequence of numbers, as we are here, your intuition would probably say, "Wait a minute..." if you heard someone say that the average value is 2. But if they're talking about things like average income, or average home prices, you're probably not going to intuitively know which "average" they're talking about, because you don't have the raw data at your fingertips, and even if you did, the number of data elements is so massive that it still wouldn't be intuitive. So it's important to know what definition of "average" is being used, particularly when the number is being used to justify someone's point of view, even more particularly when that someone is a politician.

It brings to mind the old cliche: "Figures don't lie, but liars can figure!" And so can politicians.

Thanks for listening.