"Shared Sacrifice" Indeed

If this graphic doesn't speak for itself, you can find some elaboration on the comparison here. (N.B.: Even if, implausibly, each of the millionaire households has four or even five members, the number of poor women and children participating in WIC dwarfs the number of rich folks getting tax breaks.) - Thanks again MSH!

Perspectives on the Corruption of American Politics

Over at the Huff Post I came across links to not one but two sharp political entries today: (1) this skewering of the sanctimonious Evan Bayh* for his post-Senate career in shameless lobbying and (2) this graphic presentation of the wildly negative consequences of the Bush-Obama** tax cuts.
__________
* P.S.: To date Bayh has barely risen to the level of visibility - he played bit roles in posts on nepotism and political cronyism. But he is a poster child for my campaign against bi-partisanship.
** P.S.: This label is not my creation I heard it on the radio - but it is true that Obama allowed for the renewal of the tax cuts - due in part to his sincere policy preferences and in part to his political ineptitude.

Deficit Discourse (3) ~ The Oligarchy Comes Into View

Yesterday I posted a graphic from The New York Times showing that regardless of party affiliation the public thinks job creation and economic recovery are considerably more important than deficit reduction. It turns out that the public is pretty smart. They know where the shoe pinches.

But suppose one were really, really wound up about deficits? In the past I have posted graphics [1] [2] showing the sources of our current deficit woes - primarily military adventures abroad and the Bush tax cuts bequeathed to us by Republicans and more or less enthusiastically embraced by the Obama administration. (Let's be fair, it was less enthusiasm than political incompetence on the part of Democrats that insured the tax cuts would be renewed last winter.Lesson? If you have a majority use it to advance important policy goals because you may well lose it and then you are screwed.) In any case, the underlying problem has not altered on bit as the graphic I've lifted here makes clear. As this graphic indicates (the grey portion at bottom) the non-war, non-oligarchic (tax cut) portions of the pubic debt account for a declining portion of the deficit going forward.

So, why has the Obama administration and the Congressional Democrats allowed the Red-state types set the economic agenda? The mandate of the 2010 elections hardly is as crystalline as the deficit hawks claim. End the wars rescind the tax cuts and we need not be cutting programs that impact only poor, working class and middle class Americans. But that is bound to infuriate our oligarchs. And there is the nub of the problem: the Democrats are not interested in doing that.

Yet they may not have a choice. Because it also is becoming clear that job creation, even as an explicit policy, is not a sufficient remedy for our political economic problems. As Dani Rodrik has pointed out here and Mark Thoma amplifies his point here, a good portion of the problem is distributive. And in order to remedy that pattern it is necessary to step on some oligarchic toes.

Strong Evidence Against the Theory of Evolution

This graphic shows trends in public beliefs among Americans re: evolution. You can find the most recent Gallop Poll here. But the dreary results suggest that just shy of 80% of Americans believe God has played at least some role in the evolutionary process.

_________

Update: Why evidence against the theory of evolution? One would presume that holding ludicrous beliefs runs counter to any plausible understanding of "fitness." And apparently that is no barrier to pro-creation among Americans.

Representing Complexity in Graphics

I have posted here numerous times on Ed Tufte and his work on data graphics. I've been working on and off for a while on a paper linking his views with more explicitly political graphics. So, here is an interesting convergence.

Tufte's first book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information concludes like this:

"What is to be sought in designs for the display of information is the clear portrayal of complexity. Not the complication of the simple; rather the task of the designer is to give visual access to the subtle and the difficult - that is, the revelation of the complex."

And here is part of a conversation with my colleague Douglas Crimp that you can find at the ACT UP Oral History Project in which he discusses the graphical strategies that activists in ACT UP devised in the late 1980s and early 1990s:

"I think that maybe one of the great things that ACT UP was able to do was to figure out ways of putting a certain complexity into sloganeering. Silence Equals Death is an extremely vague, and at the same time, extremely resonant image text, that, I mean, the way I wrote about it in AIDS Demo Graphics was that it was partly because one doesn’t necessarily immediately know what it means; what that pink triangle is, for example; why it’s upside down, in relation to the way it was historically used; how it was historically used. That’s not all right there. And yet, it became incredibly resonant for that very reason. So I think that there are ways, graphically and textually, to constitute a certain complexity. And I think that that was one of the achievements of the graphic and other representational work that ACT UP did."

The conversation took place in the spring of 2007, and Crimp is reflecting on events two decades earlier. The remarkable similarity between his language and Tufte's struck me. What strikes me too is that the ACT UP graphics really are data graphics. This is true not just because of the central mathematical symbol in Silence = Death, but because of the statistical materials that appeared in many other ACT UP graphics.

Deficit Discourse (2) ~ A Disaster Bequeathed to Us by BushCo

This graphic appeared at HuffPost this morning. It is not as useful as the very similar graphic I posted on here some months ago. This one is not quite as clear because it requires viewers to start at the upper left hand corner and work downward and outward - a lesson in how not to design an informative graphic. It nonetheless makes an important point.

Conservatives face a predicament. It was bequeathed to them by George Bush and his minions. They (conservatives) very much want to be deficit hawks and keep a keen eye out for government spending - especially when such spending threatens to benefit the less well off. Yet the clearest, simplest way to cut the deficit is to (1) rescind tax cuts Bush bestowed on the wealthiest Americans and (2) cut our losses and end the pointless wars he started. In other words, it is impossible to be a deficit hawk, a foreign policy hawk and a patron to the wealthy all at the same time.
__________
P.S.: And, of course, it is crucial to recognize - as the folks at HuffPost point out, that the dollar for dollar stimulating effect of tax cuts for the wealthy is significantly lower that what we get from other forms of government spending.