Well, I beg to differ. Nate Silver over at fivethirtyeight.com has made many good arguments why we can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good here. Politically, we’re as close as we’ve ever been to HCR, and even the Senate version of the bill accomplishes many very important things and can be built on. If this goes down, the Dems lose big this fall (why do you think the Republicans are fighting it so hard?) and who knows when we’ll get another decent chance.
That’s true, I suppose. I guess part of my hostility is the loss of government-run HC available to all. That was the main thing I was hoping would come out of this. Though when all is said and done I think the Democrats are going to get hit hard regardless of whether this goes through or not (if for any other reason history doesn’t favor the party with the White House keeping the majority in both houses).
And that’s often the strategy when these special deals are struck: People say, “Well, this is going to pass anyway, so we might as well tack on this special deal that benefits this one group. I mean, are you going to reject the bill just because of this one little thing?”*That doesn’t make it any less distasteful.
An interesting Left Business Observer note on where the increase in consumption spending has gone.
Everyone knows that American consumers have been on a binge for the last ten or twenty years. Data connoisseurs could even tell you that the consumption share of GDP rose from an average of 64% in the 1980s to 70% in 2007–8. But while the numbers are accurate, they’re not really telling the story of a binge. Much of the rise has come from spending on health care, not flat-screen TVs.
Awesome find, thank you Jason.
JeffL
1686
Jason, I don’t see any references - where are they getting their data from?
shift6
1687
I also hate charts that start at arbitrary locations to make the differences look bigger than they are. It’s a sophomore-level manipulation of perception (see: video card/CPU frames-per-second reviews). Re-plot that shit with Y starting at 0% so that it gives a better impression of the 10% difference added by health care, rather than making it “look like” it’s the whole damn thing.
MikeJ
1688
I don’t think anyone’s under the illusion that healthcare is 4x as much as all other consumption combined. The plot is about trends, not absolute values, and it’s easier to see the trends when you zoom in to the range of variation.
shift6
1689
My view is that the “spending binge” that the author constantly refers to wouldn’t look so much like what “everyone knows” we’ve been on if he used a better chart. Spending on health care has approximately tripled, that’s a fact*; consumption has been somehow over-zealously increased by health care, well I don’t know that I agree so much.
- based on my eyeballing the chart
Beats me what his data source is; I’d guess BEA categories.
I’m not following how making the chart requiring you to squint because the baseline makes the rest smaller would help. For example, look at this employment/population ratio chart on Brad Delong’s front page:
I mean I guess you could use 0% as the starting point, but what makes it harder to see the trend for the added benefit of hell if I know - I guess the chosen arbitrary scale doesn’t look as bad last year?
shift, the interesting thing is how much of the growth is in health care, more than how much of the total, and starting at 0 wouldn’t alter that, it would just leave lots of whitespace.
shift6
1692
Squinting has nothing to do with it. Squinting at the day-over-day changes in a dataset is not examining trends, it’s looking at minute changes overall. Also: changing datasets moves the goalposts. The chart I was complaining about is trying to show the growth between the two lines and (key point here) draws conclusions in comparing that relative change to the huge, unshown whitespace under them. The employment chart doesn’t make statements concerning the unshown part, best as I can tell. If the idea was to show that health care spending has tripled: great, it does that. But if the idea is to make statements concerning Americans’ spending binge (as the author repeatedly does, and which presumably includes the lower 60%), then the big whitespace under this “binge” should be shown to give it perspective. Also see: charts depicting the real estate prices bubble, and how your quantitative view of the bubble changes depending on the endpoints used for the axes.
I prefer to see trends in an accurate light, qualitatively speaking. Going from the bottom-left to the top-right of the chart portrays the idea that things are shooting way up or something; showing a flatter line above a ton of whitespace (as Mike mentioned) gives a more accurate picture. Trends are important, but the slope of the trendline is how people interpret things at a glance.
Example: a chart showing government debt spending since Obama became President. Would it be accurate to start that chart at the lower left and have a trend line going way up and right, and then say “see, Obama is the one who has screwed this country’s national debt!” Probably not. Probably better to show how the debt increased way over time, especially under Reagen and Bush, then with Obama’s year in office at the end. It puts the whole thing into perspective. Yes, both are technically accurate, but the former one is disguising, twisted marketing bullshit just like some of the people I deal with at work and their cherry picking nonsense.
That’s all true and I agree that that is the interesting data. But I think the author oversells it as part of our consumeristic whole rather than simply talking about that part alone.
Two equally accurate statements:
- health care spending approximately tripled over this time.
- total consumer spending increased approximately 10% over this time, most of which was due to health care spending.
Which is more alarmist? Which is more “BINGE BINGE BINGE”? Which does his chart make you feel more like you need to do something?
How would filling half the graph with the whitespace of the 50% of GDP baseline make it easier to understand where the increases in consumption spending have gone?
Imagine we’re looking at a graph of biological process or something where historically you see 50-90%, the recent baseline is 90%, but 95% is fatal - should 9-10ths of the chart be whitespace? Why? On the note of start/end periods, the chart goes back to 1950; on the note of “left to right upwards progression looking bad” I have no idea what you’re talking about.
The chart sin I think you’re remembering is showing tiny changes that don’t matter at all and making them look important by blowing them up to the size of the entire graph. Sometimes the tiny changes do matter though, which is why you compress the scales. For example, 90% a employment rate is really bad. It’d be ridiculous to create an employment rate chart with a 0% baseline where the line starts at 90%.
It’s hard to say, as both are incorrectly stated. For 2) Consumer spending as a share of GDP increased by 10% over that time period, with investment falling from 10% to 0%; for 1), health care spending increased from ~3% to ~12% of GDP.
jeffd
1694
It’s looking more and more likely that the GOP will pick up Ted Kennedy’s old Senate seat.
To everyone who was saying that the Senate should take even more time with this bill: This right here is why that was such a stupid idea. If they pick up that seat, I’d say HCR has maybe a 30% chance of passing.
JeffL
1695
Yeah, it really is the unimaginable: Mass deciding to go with a Republican for the Senate seat. This is a classic example of why a party can’t take anything for granted.
This is so depressing. I really wish that emigrating to Canada were a realistic option for me. Or Germany–I speak German passably well (you’d think that this would be easy since I work for a subsidiary of Daimler).
Yes, it has been intollerable here the past week. Shame on the dems for not just coming out swinging and burying this guy 4 weeks ago. Sadly, if there were two more weeks it would shift back. The Brown ‘i got a truck’ jokes are starting.
It does show the frustration by the masses on the state of the country.
As for healthcare- it really needs 51. Remember that. This 60 thing just makes it fillibuster proof. You and I know if the GOP filiibusters, how long will it go? How long will the public put up with stopping all government? There is a budget up ahead, an education spending bill, and money for the wars all in the next 60 days.
We will get healthcare…sadly not the healthcare we should get, but a start.
That will blow back on the party that controls the Congress - not the party that’s performing the obstructive behavior. They can always table the bill and address all that stuff about keeping the government working and come back to it later - a filibuster only has to go on for as long as the party is trying to bring the bill to the floor. I think something will pass, but I expect that all of the hard left stuff (public anything, for example) will be completely forgotten. As long as something better than the status quo happens, it’ll still be better than anything we’ve done in the past hundred years.
jeffd
1699
Solomon: You really ought to read up on how the filibuster actually works. The Senate introduced multi-track a while back; it doesn’t gum up the entire works in the slightest.
wahoo
1700
Hmm…Scott Brown’s in-trade value has collapsed as turnout word of mouth is getting out.
