Capping Deductions Isn't a Cure-All

How do you get tax reform when everyone believes that lower rates and fewer tax expenditures is a good overall policy, but no one is willing to give up their tax breaks? Mitt Romney is floating a plan to just put an overall cap on deductions. Matt Yglesias endorses it as a "clever plan" and says, "The big advantage is that since no particular deduction is eliminated, you don't reap the fury of the impacted interest groups in the same way." Ezra Klein is also positive. And I am too, but note the questions Klein asks:

This leaves a lot of unanswered questions. For instance, which deductions are covered in the $17,000 cap? Is it only the deductions he mentioned? Is it all itemized deductions? Is the state and local tax deduction in there? Is it really going to include the exclusion for employer-based health care? Is the cap in addition to, or instead of, the standard deduction? Do individual taxpayers have a lower cap than families? 

See, that's the problem. The first thing you're going to get if this goes to Ways and Means is a whole bunch of very virtuous lobbies insisting that they get carved out from it. What, you're going to make it so that if I give lots of charity I don't get the mortgage deduction that my cheapskate neighbor can take? And if Congress (and Romney) start giving in on one deduction, then the floodgates open for everyone else to exempt their deduction from the deal.

So does that make it not worth trying? Maybe, maybe not. What's far more important (as Greg Sargent flagged yesterday) is that in reality what we're likely to get from Romney is big tax cuts with token deduction elimination. But when it comes to doing actual tax reform, there's really no way to get around the fact that there are going to be winners and losers, and the losers are going to make an awful lot of noise. Doesn't make it impossible -- and I'm open to the idea that capping deductions would make it slightly easier -- but no one should fool themselves about how difficult it would be, or that there's a magic formula that can make it all work out.

Who's Spinning Whom?!? 2

One more note on the whole question of debate spin, media interpretation, and the rest of it. Erik Voeten says:

ps. as an aside: We should be careful not to suggest that debate performance doesn’t influence the media narrative. It does. But as John’s post notes, the effect of debates filtered by the media will differ from what the effect would have been if it had not been filtered.

Yup. I mean, to take the extreme case: it's hard to believe that anyone could have watched the "oops" debate and not come away with any headline other than that Rick Perry goofed in a big way. Except...well, even that one isn't true, if we think about it. I mean, you could basically ignore Perry, and focus on the other candidates, and that would push "oops" to the side, right? Or you could, I suppose, do a substance-heavy analysis that ignored as much as possible the stagecraft and theater aspects. Or...well, I looked back at my own reactions, and while I immediately acknowledged the magnitude of "oops," my main focus at my Plum Line wrap was on Herman Cain, and then went into lots of detail on Cain's performance the next day. Which isn't to say that I was "right" or anything, just that a lot of what people (myself certainly included) see in this stuff is extremely subjective, and it's very difficult to sort out how much of the eventual version that people are exposed to once it's through the filter is the debate itself and how much is the filter.

Now, the study I referred to earlier cuts through that by just measuring people's reactions based on whether they were exposed to the filtered or unfiltered debate (or both). And that's a good approach to the question they were asking. But if your interest is in how and why debates are filtered as they are, well, that's a pretty tricky problem, it seems to me.

Who's Spinning Whom?!?

John Sides reports today on some research which confirms what we all basically know: winning the spin matters more than winning the debate. That is, as Kim Fridkin et al. find, reactions differed to a 2004 debate depending on whether people just watched the debate; watched the debate and news coverage; or just watched the news coverage. As John says, there's evidence from earlier cycles for the same effect.

What I'm wondering about, however, is how the spin is going to work this time around. Who is going to select the clips that everyone sees, which therefore become the memorable moments? How is it going to work? Who are the gatekeepers these days, and how do parties and campaigns influence them?

In the old days, the key players were the producers and pundits at the broadcast, and then cable, networks. They had the first word, influenced or not by campaign spinners, and presumably what they selected out in their immediate reactions would also lead the morning shows then play all day on the cable networks. Then in the somewhat less old days we had live-blogging and immediate post-debate reactions. My general sense is that bloggers had relatively less influence on general election debate reactions than on other stories, thus leaving the TV networks and their teams still the ones who were driving reactions, although I have no idea whether that's correct or not.

But at any rate, that's the old days. This is a case where it really Could Be Different now, thanks to twitter and YouTube. It was always true that the bulk of decisions about winners and losers and key moments were made before the debate was over (and the campaign actively worked to influence those choices before the debate was over), but most or all of that was happening at the debate site and among a fairly small group of people. Now, there's a whole second process going on, with a broader group of reporters, pundits, experts, partisans, and others all following each other on the twitter machine (yes, bloggers have been live-blogging debates for a few cycles now, but that's a much different thing). And then there's the YouTube side of it; these days, there's no guarantee that the clips selected by the networks are going to be the most seen clips.

Certainly during the GOP primaries the twitter chatter seemed to be how the national press formed its consensus about what had happened and what the key moments had been, and that was all happening immediately. However, general election debates are a whole different ballgame, so I suppose we'll see how it all turns out. One thing: this certainly seems to be an area for media studies specialists to do some very helpful research.

Important caveat: as John reminds us, most people who bother to watch the debates have already made up their minds, and therefore filter what they hear through those decisions. So debates aren't all that likely to make much of a difference one way or another, however the spin works. Still, debates can be important in other ways, and one way or another they certainly get a lot of attention, and therefore I'm definitely interested to see how they work this time around.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Avery Brooks, 64.  I've bashed his performance as Sisko; in his defense, he mostly had to play off of the weaker half of the cast. And the Sisko/Dax friendship is terrific. In other random DS9 comments: my eldest and I think they should have done a spinoff starring Admiral Ross -- a sitcom, in which Ross goes about his day as the world's most boring character while unbeknownst to him all sorts of wacky things are going on. I suppose Troi could make a guest appearance in which she senses that someone is up to something...

Before I get any deeper into it, I better get to the good stuff:

1. Lots of Dartmouth profs talk about the debates.

2. Have to agree with Andrew Gelman on this one. Ronald Reagan was no moderate. Picked the right year to win the nomination; he would have lost in 1968 or 1976.

3. Monica Potts on last night's Warren/Brown debate. She doesn't convey the sense, however, of just how bad David Gregory was.

4. And Steve Kornacki has been doing a great job showing how Mitt Romney's party is constantly cutting off every good option he might have. Today's installment: immigration.

The Left and Right Myths of ACA's Path to Law

Ah, deflating myths. I've decided that the patron saint of those who attempt to deflate myths must be Pie Traynor. For some reason, Pie Traynor at one time wound up with the reputation of being the Greatest Ever Third Baseman, despite the clear fact that, well, he wasn't anything special, at least not of that level. Anyway, it took a long detour having to do with Brooks Robinson (a great player, to be sure), but as far as I know cares about Pie Traynor anymore, and  perhaps he's now actually unfairly undervalued, if anyone bothers valuing him at all. So maybe myths really can be deflated over time. At any rate:

One more time. Like it or hate it, everyone seems to agree about one thing when it comes to the Affordable Care Act: the way that it was passed was extraordinary. Republicans believe that it was “rammed through” Congress (see for example an otherwise excellent column over the weekend); Democrats believe it was stalled for months as Barack Obama and Max Baucus desperately tried and failed at a pointless effort to achieve consensus.

The truth?

Passage of the ACA was about as normal as it gets in the contemporary Congress. Was it unduly delayed? No, not really; sure, it’s always possible to find ways that a schedule could have been accelerated a week here or a week there, but there’s really nothing in the timeline for passing this extremely complex piece of legislation that cries out “delay.” As far as the conservative case, there's really nothing there either. The use of reconciliation as part of the final passage of portions of the bill was unusual, but that's normal under a regime of what Barbara Sinclair calls "Unorthodox Lawmaking." It's not as if they held the vote open on the House floor for hours while lobbyists bribed party leaders and their allies used personally rewarding highly persuasive methods to woo reluctant Republicans

Basically, what we learn from Sinclair and other Congressional scholars is that billls take a long time to become law; that in the current era many major bills are really omnibus combinations of many smaller pieces of legislation; that no bill becomes a law without numerous deals and trade-offs; that Congress is strongly polarized along party lines and that therefore we should expect partisan votes on key bills, especially when unified government allows bills to become law without out-party votes; that multiple committees and the party leadership will all be involved; and that the paths various bills take from soup to nuts can differ quite a bit, requiring lawmakers to be innovative and flexible about procedures. All of which was on display in the passage of the ACA. Basically, if you think something happened during that story that shouldn't have happened, go read Sinclair. There certainly are a lot of interesting things that happened, and it's a very good how-a-bill-becomes-a-law story, but mainly because it's such a great example of how the process works these days -- not because someone did something wrong.

Catch of the Day

This was going to be some cranky blogging, but I happened to look around after I wrote it and noticed that not only did Steve M. beat me to it, but he did a better job than I was going to do on Frank Bruni's obscene column urging "sacrifice" in the NYT Sunday Review yesterday. "It's time to take our medicine"??? Disgusting.

I mean, wrong as Bruni is on Paul Ryan, he's even totally unfair to Mitt Romney, who actually has been saying, at least recently, that people shouldn't expect a tax cut from his tax reform proposal. You know how hard it is to be unfair to Mitt Romney over his tax reform position? And yet Bruni manages to do it. Let alone the rest of it...you know, before Bruni whines about how politicians won't ask people to give up their gas guzzlers, he might want to look up something about CAFE standards and Barack Obama (vs. say, Romney's views -- if you get rid of the phony "sacrifice" junk, you can often find that politicians actually have policy positions, which aren't all the same).

Anyway, I'll also take the opportunity to plug my old idea for a Chess Model of Sacrifice. The idea is to remove "sacrifice" out of the "morality" drawer and put it into the "pragmatic" drawer. There's nothing noble about a sacrifice in chess, and we would be far better off if we talked about sacrifice in politics without the mythology of nobility that gets dragged into it. 

Oh, and: Nice catch!

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Matt Cain, 28. His baseball-ref most similar going in to the season was John Smoltz, and Cain had a better age-27 year than Smoltz did...but Smoltz then took a big step forward and had five excellent years after that. Still, I'm curious about what Cain's most-similar list will look like after this season.

In the meantime, the good stuff:

1. I know I'm going to write a pre-debate post sometime this week, but alas for me Seth Masket already has it all covered. Short, to the point, covers it all.

2. More on the party ID/polling question, from Mark Blumenthal; see also Simon Jackman's estimates of "house effects." Once again, they're pretty small.

3. Ezra Klein talks to Lynn Vavreck about undecided voters.

4. Nate Silver on economic data and politics.

5. Eric McGhee on redistricting -- the apparent effects of the 2010 round.

6. I have no idea whether Laura Helmuth is correct or not about Lyme Disease, but I don't think the Romney/Ryan campaign has received nearly enough ridicule for sending out a flyer on the topic in which the first action they're promising is to "IMPROVE SYNERGY." I suppose if it worked for Liz Lemon sort of...

7. And I really enjoyed this interview with Chris Weuve about aircraft carriers in space and other issues between real-life naval warfare and science fiction, especially in film and TV, but I'm still left wondering: why would Khan automatically, through inexperience, fail to understand three-dimensional warfare? It's such a great movie, but I've always had a problem with that.