Month: February 2014

Obamacare’s marketing to young adults isn’t going
as well as hoped.
According to Buzzfeed, the original, highly targeted campaign
to reach out to the young and healthy individuals who the White
House has said are critical to the law’s success has been largely
scrapped:

The original recruitment plan envisioned by Enroll America and
other White House allies was highly targeted: Using an army of
grassroots workers, the groups planned to knock on individual doors
to find the uninsured and educate them about their new health care
options.

After relying on that method during the opening months of health
care enrollment, the effort has been largely scrapped, those
familiar with recruitment said, especially when it comes to young
people. It proved harder to find the volunteers supporters needed
for canvassing efforts than it did to find volunteers willing to
work at events, organizers said, and canvassing for young people
proved slower than expected. In its place now is a recruitment
drive focused on finding young people where they gather and handing
out information about the health care law.

The context here is that last summer, before the botched launch
of the exchanges, the White House was telling reporters that the
law’s success or failure hinged on the percentage of young adult
sign ups. “To the White House, the difference between success and
failure is straightforward: They need to entice a sufficient number
of young and healthy adults into the new insurance marketplaces
that open Oct. 1,” wrote The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein
and Sarah Kliff in
a lengthy report on how the administration planned to convince
young people to buy insurance under the law. Persuading young,
healthy people to buy insurance, the pair wrote, was the “crux of
Obamacare’s challenge.”

That obviously hasn’t happened to the extent that the White
House was hoping. Before the exchanges went live, the
administration said it was looking for about seven million
enrollees in the exchanges, and needed about 39 percent of them to
be between the ages of 18 and 34. But the most recent data we have
indicates that, so far, that age cohort makes up more like 24-25
percent of the total.

The same Post report also describes the White House’s
belief that it will be able to use data-driven, campaign style
targeting to connect with uninsured young adults. The Buzzfeed
article suggests that those efforts haven’t really worked. The
administration and its allies are doing what they can to modify
their approach, but they’re also just redefining success, saying
that seven million sign ups was never really the goal and that
things will be just fine with a much lower percentage of young
adults than they’d targeted. Which was not only predictable but
predicted. “[The administration’s] job in 2013 is to
declare victory in any way possible,” Doug Holtz-Eakin, president
of the conservative American Action Forum, told the Post.
“They’ll keep moving goal posts until they can declare
victory.” 

Evidently the Democrats hope that flogging the
class warfare, uh, the growing inequality meme will enable them to
cling to their control of the U.S. Senate and put them in charge of
the House of Representatives. Over at the Washington Post
columnist Robert Samuelson takes on the rhetorical misuse of
inequality and makes the entirely sensible point that…

…Economic
inequality is usually a consequence of our problems and not a
cause.

For starters, the poor are not poor because the rich are rich.
The two conditions are generally unrelated. Mostly, the rich got
rich by running profitable small businesses (car dealerships,
builders), creating big enterprises (Google, Microsoft), being at
the top of lucrative occupations (bankers, lawyers, doctors,
actors, athletes), managing major companies or inheriting fortunes.
By contrast, the very poor often face circumstances that make their
lives desperate.

What kind of
circumstances? Not graduating from high school and having kids
before getting married.

A few weeks back, citing recent Congressional Budget Office data
I explained “Why
President Obama Is Wrong on Inequality“:

Are the rich getting richer? Yes. Are the poor getting poorer?
No. In fact, over the past 35 years most Americans got richer. Has
income inequality increased in the United States? Yes….

…from 1979 and 2010, the last year for which data are
available, the bottom fifth’s after-tax income in constant dollars
rose by 49 percent. The incomes of households in the second lowest,
middle, and fourth quintiles increased by 37 percent, 36 percent,
and 45 percent, respectively. The poor and the middle class got
richer.

Burtless then divides the households situated in the top fifth
of incomes into four groups: those in 90th percentile and below,
those in the 91st through 95th percentiles, those in the 96th
through 99th percentiles, and the top 1 percent. From 1979 to 2010,
incomes for those fortunate households increased by 54 percent, 67
percent, 79 percent, and 202 percent, respectively. The rich got
richer too, and they got richer faster.

Samuelson agrees. Parsing the CBO data a bit differently,
Samuelson reports:

True, the top 1 percent outdid everyone. From 1980 to 2010,
their inflation-adjusted pretax incomes grew a spectacular 190
percent, almost a tripling. But for the poorest fifth of Americans,
pretax incomes for these years rose 44 percent. Gains were 31
percent for the second poorest, 29 percent for the middle fifth, 38
percent for the next fifth and 83 percent for the richest fifth,
including the top 1 percent. Because our system redistributes
income from top to bottom, after-tax gains were larger: 53 percent
for the poorest fifth; 41 percent for the second; 41 percent for
the middle-fifth; 49 percent for the fourth; and 90 percent for
richest.

Samuelson concludes:

Americans in the top 1 percent are convenient scapegoats. They
don’t naturally command much sympathy, and their rewards sometimes

seem outsized or outlandish. When most people are getting
ahead, they don’t worry much about this economic inequality. When
progress stalls, they do. There’s a backlash and a tendency to see
less economic inequality as a solution to all manner of problems.
We create simplistic narratives and imagine that punishing the rich
will miraculously uplift the poor. This vents popular resentments,
even as it encourages self-deception.

For more background see Reason.com editor Nick Gillespie’s
excellent column, “Why
Obama Can’t Solve Inequality” over at The Daily
Beast.

Evidently the Democrats hope that flogging the
class warfare, uh, the growing inequality meme will enable them to
cling to their control of the U.S. Senate and put them in charge of
the House of Representatives. Over at the Washington Post
columnist Robert Samuelson takes on the rhetorical misuse of
inequality and makes the entirely sensible point that…

…Economic
inequality is usually a consequence of our problems and not a
cause.

For starters, the poor are not poor because the rich are rich.
The two conditions are generally unrelated. Mostly, the rich got
rich by running profitable small businesses (car dealerships,
builders), creating big enterprises (Google, Microsoft), being at
the top of lucrative occupations (bankers, lawyers, doctors,
actors, athletes), managing major companies or inheriting fortunes.
By contrast, the very poor often face circumstances that make their
lives desperate.

What kind of
circumstances? Not graduating from high school and having kids
before getting married.

A few weeks back, citing recent Congressional Budget Office data
I explained “Why
President Obama Is Wrong on Inequality“:

Are the rich getting richer? Yes. Are the poor getting poorer?
No. In fact, over the past 35 years most Americans got richer. Has
income inequality increased in the United States? Yes….

…from 1979 and 2010, the last year for which data are
available, the bottom fifth’s after-tax income in constant dollars
rose by 49 percent. The incomes of households in the second lowest,
middle, and fourth quintiles increased by 37 percent, 36 percent,
and 45 percent, respectively. The poor and the middle class got
richer.

Burtless then divides the households situated in the top fifth
of incomes into four groups: those in 90th percentile and below,
those in the 91st through 95th percentiles, those in the 96th
through 99th percentiles, and the top 1 percent. From 1979 to 2010,
incomes for those fortunate households increased by 54 percent, 67
percent, 79 percent, and 202 percent, respectively. The rich got
richer too, and they got richer faster.

Samuelson agrees. Parsing the CBO data a bit differently,
Samuelson reports:

True, the top 1 percent outdid everyone. From 1980 to 2010,
their inflation-adjusted pretax incomes grew a spectacular 190
percent, almost a tripling. But for the poorest fifth of Americans,
pretax incomes for these years rose 44 percent. Gains were 31
percent for the second poorest, 29 percent for the middle fifth, 38
percent for the next fifth and 83 percent for the richest fifth,
including the top 1 percent. Because our system redistributes
income from top to bottom, after-tax gains were larger: 53 percent
for the poorest fifth; 41 percent for the second; 41 percent for
the middle-fifth; 49 percent for the fourth; and 90 percent for
richest.

Samuelson concludes:

Americans in the top 1 percent are convenient scapegoats. They
don’t naturally command much sympathy, and their rewards sometimes

seem outsized or outlandish. When most people are getting
ahead, they don’t worry much about this economic inequality. When
progress stalls, they do. There’s a backlash and a tendency to see
less economic inequality as a solution to all manner of problems.
We create simplistic narratives and imagine that punishing the rich
will miraculously uplift the poor. This vents popular resentments,
even as it encourages self-deception.

For more background see Reason.com editor Nick Gillespie’s
excellent column, “Why
Obama Can’t Solve Inequality” over at The Daily
Beast.

Over
at The Weekly Standard, Andrew Ferguson has a great
piece about Herblock, the legendary and multiple Pulitzer
Prize-winning editorial cartoonist who, well, sucked at editorial
cartoons. The news hook for the piece is an HBO documentary,
The Black & The White, about Herblock, who died in
2001 and worked at The Washingon Post for 55 years.

From Ferguson’s piece, which is a great attack on the smug,
self-congratulatory tone among legacy media types:

The stars [of the documentary] are the real-life personages who
pop up to attest to Block’s greatness—his irreverence, his
bottomless imagination, his moral courage in taking on the powerful
and damn the consequences. They make quite a gallery, these
personages. Aside from a pair of show-biz stars, Jon Stewart and
the comedian Lewis Black, they are cave dwellers of the
Washington/New York media racket, what’s left of it. Most of them
are face-famous, of course, and instantly recognizable, but you can
also tell their stature from the things they actually make
themselves say. 

“It was as if Jesus himself were walking around the
newsroom,” says Hendrik Hertzberg of the New
Yorker….

A Herblock cartoon, says Tom Brokaw, “was like a punch in the
face.”

“You didn’t want to be Herblock’s enemy,” says Ted Koppel. “He’d
nail your hide to the wall.”

“Herb exposed hypocrisy,” says Bob Woodward. 

“Herb was the conscience of the country,” says Roger
Rosenblatt. 

He was “irreverent,” “fearless,” “willing to offend”—so much a
renegade indeed that he won three Pulitzer Prizes, got syndicated
to 1,800 newspapers, mounted exhibitions of his work at the Library
of Congress, and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. This
is a special kind of renegade.

The most impressive thing? Herblock did it all without ever
getting a laugh or providing anything like a real insight. That
takes talent, dedication, and, well, renegadism up the
ying-yang.

Read the whole article.

More on editorial cartoons as a genre
gone terribly, terribly wrong.