Brad, I think that your intended dragging of the likes of Weisman will have to be less metaphorical than you would like.

Read the Howler today, and see how the Press Establishment, as embodied by the WaPo editors, intends to cover the sunlight-based community.

I think we need to hammer home There Is No Crisis as Message #1, but it needs messages such as those Kevin suggests following right behind.

And that is a noble goal. The ideal situation would be one where the shadow puppets are unnecessary, but until then, the task of the reality-based community is to ensure that the shadow puppets match the actual Forms. Not something the right-wing cares about at all, not being reality-based.

The proper job of people like Brad (and me, for that matter) is to argue factually and try to sway opinion leaders. Weisman is a good target for this campaign.

However, in addition to that there's also the grungy, populist, Harry & Louise style arguments aimed at the average schmoe. The question is, whose proper job is it to make those arguments?

They way I see it we need to approach this both ways. People like Brad need to keep hammering on the facts and reality. But that in and of itself is probably not enough.

What ever it takes, we need to do it.

Grandma Jo

Here's the speech I'd like to see the Democrats give on this (follow the link).

I massively disagree, Brad. We've already won over the people that are reasonable. What makes you think that somehow the rest are going to have an 'AhHa!' moment, no matter what they are shown?

This is why liberals lose. We as a group think that everyone is just like we are. Different people have different 'convincer' strategies. Lets face it, raw facts are not going to work. John kerry would be president elect if this were the case.

Brad, feel free to drag people out of the cave. Its a noble task to show the rest of the smart guys this we are correct. However, it will never win an election. Take it from me - someone who knows people better than he knows economic theory - facts almost never win arguments or convert people. You sell the sizzle, not the steak.

Actually, you change the environment, not the people. You can argue and cajole until you're blue in the face, but people will spontaneously change their behavior in accordance with the environment - like magic. The problem is the democrats have absolutely no control over the environment. It's not just the levers of politics but the ability to define the common narrative which is the environment which people operate under.

Josh - link?

Hal - No control over the environment? Tell the Republicans of "Hillarycare" fame about no control.

What happends in Iraq (and possible responses of currency markets) will determine the amount of 'political capital' that Bush has to spend. If things are going well in Iraq (and the dollar doesn't drop precipitously), the American people will be inclined to let Bush do what he wants with Social Security. Otherwise they will be reluctant to buy another pig in a poke.

But sadly while I often see things clearly I am nearly always wrong.

we'll never get anywhere without recognizing a basic truth about human nature, recognized by Plato and updated by Freud. Most of us are run most of the time by the lowest level of our psyche -Plato's 'desires' and Freud's 'id'. the id does not learn, it knows not good or bad, logic, time, or self awareness. Growing to adulthood is a process of developing control of the id by our rational nature. Some people develop more control than others. But in all cases when certain areas of life are touched, the irrational fears, desires, agressions, lusts, will rise up and overwhelm rationality.

The Republicans have learned how to touch these areas and train their voters to respond, even against their own rational interests. If you can make people afraid or threaten their control then they become angry and stupid. Then you offer them a candidate who promises to deal with their fear and they vote for him without thinking.

If you try to drag them out of the cave, they will bcome angry and afraid and they will get angry and kill you. they can't be dragged. They must be LED.

I agree with Kevin, but I think Josh Marshall was right in observing that the line about "fund managers getting rich off your social security money" doesn't have much traction with people. This is America, and lots of people believe that if they can get a little richer off a scheme whereby rich people get a lot richer, hey, that's the American way. Everyone on this list who has been saying that job one is to convince people that there is no crisis is right on. That, and that the only danger is that Bush will continue looting the general fund.

Does anybody know what the Dems' game plan is? Last week I got an e-mail saying that they were soon, very soon, going to let me know how they were going to fight privatization. That they sent me a preparatory e-mail announcing this is sad and funny for lots of reasons, but does anyone know if they really do have something good in the hopper?

Professor, you have a lot of work to do on Alan Murray as well. And he's probably more important than Weisman, because he's on TEEVEE.

Okay, but there are two major problems in our era, of entirely different provenances:

(1) Religion has forgotten the path to the Unitary state of being, indeed denigrating "mysticism," and has fallen instead into word-orientated theologies about god and prophets, which are easily perverted by egoes to promote their aggrandizing, hot little rear-ends;

And:

(2) Science calculates in bipartite segments--two things at a time--and this is unsuited to the accurate prediction of Complex Systems, which are reticulated multi-compartment webs, containing simultaneous multiple causations. And nowadays our problems have grown to the size of continuous questions about these systems--climate, ecosystem, economy,--while scientists have yet to acknowledge, much less institutionalize, their general non-predictability, for fear of being inductive fools. Or maybe, losing funding.

These two failures do not have anything to do with each other. They are entirely different problems in modern thought, completely unconnected.

However there are a number of combined results, which characterize our times:

(A) There is no real agreement on how to proceed. The closest form of agreement is the blind joining with the blind: the merging of an individualist stance toward salvation (from clowns in the perverted religious camp) with the perfect free-market morphology (from the clowns of beginner economics, who suppose that prices come near to resolving the informational flows of a reticulated web.)

(B) The two larger groups from whence these lesser clowns have tumbled-out, have really almost nothing in common, and so they talk past each other, or scream at one another.

(C) Indeed there is almost no sense that the correct stance of the Enlightenment is a Dual epistemology, presently irresolvable, in which both sides must develop independently, that is, within the same person. And only the person who continues on both paths simultaneously, is to be called educated and civilized.

(D) Instead, "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." (Yeats)

(E) There is another middle-movement of the muffle-headed, who sense that both organized theology and first-order science and economics are suspect: that all amount to less than the full story, and when held exclusively, each is crackpot. So far, so good... But these people err on the side of depending solely upon meditational techniques, and they distrust science a little bit more. Or let in phony scientisms. So they build pyramids out of paper clips, to sit under at their computers.

(E) Policy has become almost entirely dominated by the worst sort of short-sighted, nearly psychopathic, wealth-getters and plutocrats, who have taken the stand-off circumstance of (B), to promulgate the free-market theology of (A), looting the Treasury, screwing the poor, and shredding the thin film of the biosphere.

(F) Facts don't matter, and emotions only matter at election-time.

So I say, Brad, both you AND Kevin Drum are right. We have to start hitting with everything we've got.

How about this for an emotional argument?

"Want to spend the evenning of your life eating cat-food?"

Compelling argument in Kevin's favor: Rumsfeld can fuck up a war with piss poor planning and hold on to his job, but when it becomes public that he didn't personally sign condolence letters to families of fallen troops even Conservative senators call for his head.

If we say "We must cry Wolf, even though there is none, because people will never believe there's no Wolf at the door", aren't we close to declaring "Democracy can't possibly work, not here, not now"?

One of our problems is a media environment where the stars are convinced they are brighter and braver than the people they cover. They think they discovered an Awful Truth that craven politicians were conspiring to roll into the out-years.

Having adopted this heroic view of their own misconceptions, they will not easily be set straight. The extent to which they can face facts and admit error will be a true test of their brightness and bravery.

Grandma Jo and others are right; both approaches are needed. Some of us approach life through the left brain, others the right brain, and yet others with their brain stem.

Sadly, I am highly dubious how many people cab Brad drag out of the cave.

Perhaps we should chip in and have Brad broadcast an hour-long infomertial, Perot style. Thinking about it, the mere audacity of it could convince many people -- not that they would understand. I am considering a financial contribution for such a scheme, provided that Brad promises to follow professional suggestions concerning his make-up and apparel.

I am a bit worried that Brad hails from LIBERAL BERKELEY. Perhaps he could share the show with a bussiness professor from, say, Oklahoma or Utah? There may exist Utah liberals, but UTAH LIBERAL just does not have a ring to it as an invective.

First, I do not think Bush intends to really work hard to get Social Security privatization passed. He is just throwing a bone to the Wall Street crowd who supported him to keep them in his camp.

Second, what chance to you think any Senator who votes for this has of getting re-elected? Recall what percentage of retired people and young people vote and how large each group is when answering that question. I would not vote for it if I wanted to be in office again.

Third, knowing that all we really have to do is make sure that at least 41 Senators are well aware that we will throw everything at them to defeat them should they vote for SS Privatization. Filibuster it in the Senate until Bush is gone and it will probably die the ignoble death it deservers.

Rather than go through the trouble of trying to convince the Jonathan Weismans of the world to change their ways, which they will find difficult because they have a paper trail of "balanced" compositions with their names on them, why not go after the nameless editor who has the power to affix a headline atop the piece? "Lying Administration Swine Lie Again" as a lead trumps any balanced reporting the reporter may commit within. I mean, goodness me, the radical right press seems to have no qualms about such a framing of arguments.

"Wall Street tycoons are being cagey about this, but the truth is that they can't wait to get their hands on your retirement money. Management fees is what this is really all about, isn't it?"

Oh, yeah, when selling to a mass market in a competive environment the key to success is to charge a whole lot! Just ask Wal-Mart!!

Oh, no, it's not about fees, it's about profits. Gosh, there's a difference.

And if you have the highest fees so that customers go elsewhere, what's your profit going to be??

BTW, how does the Federal Thrift Savings Plan actually operate in the real world with private firms managing investments charging an 0.1% fee?

Perhaps the words "competitive bidding" have something to do with it?

It's odd how some people claim to be telling the truth about the real world while working so hard to ignore it.

Jim., you need to look around more.
Everywhere that privatised social security has been tried exorbitant management fees are an issue. Just talk to any Chilean, or google "UK pension opt-out" to find out what happens when the sharks get let loose on the average worker's compulsory pension contribution. Its just too easy to rip off the uninterested and/or ignorant (in economese, there's a problem of asymmetric information).

Brad and Kevin are both right. We need a good-policy-promoting version of Rush Limbaugh, but it would be totally inappopriate for a professor to take that role.

No wonder Wal-Mart's so cost-efficient! Quickly web-glossing, we find that: because of low wages below the poverty line, a typical Wal-Mart store of 200 employees costs American federal taxpayers $420,750 per year, through all of the following: housing and food assistance, low-income federal tax credits and reductions, additional Title I expenses, federal children's health insurance, and low-income energy assistance (report of the U.S. House of Representatives, February 16, 2004). Total number of Wal-mart stores in U.S.: 2400 (?) Total cost therefore, of Walmart labor practices alone, to federal purse: just over $1 billion. Yet Walmart sales account for 2% of the GDP, while their corporate share of the total tax burden is declining. Competition at work! With redistribution. So we're back to securitized sociality...

I think Mickslam has a pont when he says that we assume that other people think like we do.

Hannah Arendt describes thinking as the dialog inside the head, "the soundless dialog of the I with itself", one voice criticizing the other. "The thinking ego, of which I am perfectly conscious so long as the thinking activity lasts, will disappear as though it were a mere mirage when the real world asserts itself again." The Life of the Mind, 74-5

When I listen to spinners and republicans, I wonder if they actually listen to the second voice, which in my mind would be saying things like: but what about [insert fact], or, that argument fails the simple test of logic, so I won't say that out loud and be embarassed. I wonder if they exercise some form of self-censorship or self-criticism of their thoughts or political positions. It sure doesn't sound like it, and it makes me think that they really are unable to think in the same way that academics and many others do.

So, we need to convince them in some other way, without losing our self-respect.

Odd, I am on the site of an Economics Professor and yet hear much more discussion of Hannah Arendt, George Lakoff, and by all the gods Mr. shadows on the cave wall Plato, than I do about real numbers as compared to the business pages.

Do you believe that the fact that US productivity for 2004 is coming in at 4.0% compared to the Intermediate Cost Alternative projection of 2.7%, or that the Bush Administration is predicting 3.5% for 2005 compared to the official estimate of 1.8% in the 2004 Trustee's report might be a little more important, might have a little more impact on the argument, than arguments about whether we can frame this one in Lakoffian terms?

I admire Hannah, George was one of the best Professors I ever took a course from, I share Popper's contempt for Plato. I am in no way contemptuous of the Academy as a whole, I fully intended to spend my life within it. (Didn't work out).

But there is some lack of recognition here that BushCo's numbers simply do not add up. They are lying. Again. And we do not win this one by elevating the conversation. We win it by pointing out that their economic models for privatization implicitly or explicity rely on productivity numbers that show the Social Security Trust Fund as fully funded. It ain't broke.

This is not the time to evoke the great philosophers of our day, it is the time to channel Sean Connery in the Untouchables: "they bring a knife you bring a gun". Their numbers are bogus. Have the courage of your convictions, their numbers simply shatter on their own tables and figures:

http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/TR/TR04/V_economic.html#wp159107
Economic Assumptions under the Three Alternatives
http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/TR/TR04/II_project.html#wp106217
Trust Fund Ratios under the Three Alternatives

Lakoff's framing is a valuable tactic. It is not a strategy. And we are not getting anywhere trying to convince people that Bush's rhetoric is some equivalent of the shadows of flames flickering on the cave wall.

Lying. Again. Then repeat.

Jim Glass wrote, "And if you have the highest fees so that customers go elsewhere, what's your profit going to be??"

*That's* why management fees at mutual funds have all been bid down to the level of Vanguard's! Not.

"BTW, how does the Federal Thrift Savings Plan actually operate in the real world with private firms managing investments charging an 0.1% fee?"

(1) There's zero evidence that this is the kind of system that the privatizers want to put into place. (2) Comparing TSP's rates to Social Securities is an apples to oranges comparison, as TSP doesn't provide an annuity.

(Added note: when I say the privatizers, I mean the privatizers as a cabal, not individual privatizers who may claim to back such an asset structure.)

liberal,
I think one of the TSP options, when you have to start taking money out, is an annuity. This decision point is coming up soon for me. Most likely will take the minimum out as right now don't need the money. Might even reinvest it in foreign/TIPS.

Caves are some of the good places, they are part of the Lowest Deep, where we are protected from the thoughts of the Evil Ones.

Will you collect less in benefits than you've paid in? Calculate it yourself and see:

http://www.ssa.gov/planners/calculators.htm

dilbert dogbert wrote, "I think one of the TSP options, when you have to start taking money out, is an annuity."

Maybe. But I refuse to believe it costs as little as the operating costs of the TSP stock fund (which someone on the web today (reasonably) claimed was as low as 0.06%, and which I recall as being lower than 0.20%). Meaning Jim Glass (and everyone else putting forth this argument) is comparing apples to oranges.

Really, to settle these arguments, we need to know what exactly the operating costs of the TSP stock fund covers, and what exactly the operating costs of Social Security covers.

Kosh wrote, "Will you collect less in benefits than you've paid in?"

Not if the Republicans succeed in translating the false descriptive statement "the economy cannot afford to honor the IOUs in the Social Security trust fund" into the abominable normative statement "the government should not honor the IOUs in the Social Security trust fund."