Don't Forget Not to Vote

The lack of accurate knowledge of the likely effect of Pennsylvania's voter ID law on election turnout has been frustrating. Estimates of the percentage of citizens lacking ID vary considerably because they are inferred indirectly from large public data bases. It's obvious that the best way to find the answer is to interview a random sample of Pennsylvania voters and ask them directly whether they have the identification required by the law.

Fortunately, a survey was commissioned by the plaintiffs in Applewhite, et al. v. the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, an ongoing legal case brought in Commonwealth Court by a coalition of groups that are challenging the law. It was conducted by Dr. Matt Barreto, a survey researcher from the University of Washington. Dr. Barreto's report is available online, along with appendixes containing the wording of the questions and the tables of results.

The survey was conducted by telephone using random digit dialing, which ensures that all telephone numbers—listed or unlisted—have an equal chance of being chosen. A sample of 1285 people was obtained, 78% of them from landline exchanges and the remainer from cell phones. Since the impact of the law on Black and Hispanic voters was of special interest, they were deliberately oversampled from commercially-available lists, which should improve the accuracy of the estimates for these subgroups. The survey has a margin of error of +/-2.7%. That means that if 50% of the respondents say their favorite color is red, then 95% of the time the true percentage who prefer red will be between 47.3% and 52.7%.

34.6% of those who answered the phone agreed to participate in the survey. Since about 30% of the calls were not answered (in three tries), the response rate—the percentage of those called who completed the survey—was 24.2%. I started doing research when people seldom screened their calls and were more willing to answer research questions, so this response rate seems low to me. However, a response rate of 20-30% is considered acceptable by contemporary standards.

All of the respondents were asked as many questions as necessary to determine whether they had a valid photo ID under the law in their possession—either a current driver's license or any one of ten other acceptable forms of ID. To be valid, the ID has to have an expiration date and be issued in their current legal name. The major results were:

1. 14.4% of eligible voters (1,364,433 people) lack a valid photo ID under the law. Looking only at registered voters, it is 12.8%, and 12.6% of those who voted in 2008.
2. 37.3% of eligible voters, 34.3% of registered voters, and 34.2% of 2008 voters don't even know that the voter ID law exists.
3. 97.8% of eligible voters, 98.8% of registered voters, and 98.7% of 2008 voters believe they have a valid ID. Comparing these figures to the percentage who actually have a valid ID shows that many people are mistaken and unlikely to do anything about it before election day.
4. If you don't have a valid ID, in order to get one you need proof of citizenship, proof of address, and a social security card. 27.6% of those who do not have a valid ID will be unable to obtain one before election day because they lack one or more of those documents.

The impact of the law on the election depends on the differences among demographic subgroups in eligibility to vote. The following data are for eligible voters, although the differences are quite similar for registered voters or those who voted in 2008.

1. Gender. Women (17.2%) are more likely to lack a valid photo ID than men (11.5%).
2. Age. People over 75 (17.8%) and under 35 (17.9%) are more likely to lack ID than middle-aged people (10.3%).
3. Race. 14% of Whites, 13.2% of Blacks and 18.3% of Hispanics lack a valid ID. The nonsignificant difference between Whites and Blacks was a surprising finding.
4. Education. Voters without a high school diploma (18.5%) were most likely to lack ID. As education increases, lack of ID declines. Only 8.3% with a college degree lack ID.
5. Income. Income is the strongest predictor of lack of ID. 22% of those making less than $20,000/year lack valid ID, compared to only 8.2% of those making more than $80,000/year.
6. Region. Voters living in Allegheny—that is, Pittsburgh and vicinity—(18.7%) and Philadelphia (17.8%) Counties are less likely to have ID than those living in the rest of the state.

In 2008, Barack Obama defeated John McCain by 10.3% in Pennsylvania, which was considered a landslide. Early indications are that this year's election will be much closer. Obviously, disenfranchising 14% of eligible voters can have a considerable impact on the outcome, especially since almost all the subgroups that are more likely to lack ID currently show a preference for the President.

The survey shows that, in passing this voter suppression law, Pennsylvania's Elephants have succeeded beyond their wettest dreams. When House Majority Leader Mike Turzai told his fellow Elephants that the law would “allow” a Romney victory in November, this was no idle boast. A better word might have been “ensure.”

Prior to this month's hearing in Commonwealth Court, the Corbett administration agreed in a court document that it knows of no cases of in-person voter fraud in Pennsylvania, and does not anticipate any in November. However, they argue that evidence of fraud is unnecessary to justify the law. It is sufficient that legislators can “imagine” the possibility of fraud.

If the court allows this outrageously bad law to stand, it's time for Pennsylvania's citizens to grab their torches and pitchforks and begin the long march to Harrisburg.

Addendum

I'm glad to see that the plaintiffs are thinking about one of the less obvious but more important impacts of the voter ID law—its tendency to slow down lines at the polls. Long waiting lines at the polls are already a problem in many areas of Pennsylvania, especially in low income areas and near college campuses. Unfortunately, if people give up and go home rather than face long queues, there will be no public record of the fact that they have been discouraged from voting by the law.

Motivated Reasoning

The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises, or else by some distinction sets aside and rejects, in order than by this great and pernicious predetermination the authority of its former conclusion may remain inviolate.

Francis Bacon

Monday's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette contains two articles about drilling for natural gas in the Marcellus shale by the method known as fracking. One of them reports that the U. S. Chamber of Commerce is beginning a new lobbying effort in order to persuade the citizens of Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia not to annoy the natural gas industry by enacting new taxes or environmental regulations. The Chamber will spend “millions of dollars” on this campaign. (The actual amount is not stated.) Gene Barr, president of Pennsylvania's Chamber of Business and Industry, said, “You can call it advocacy or lobbying, but I use the word education.” Presumably, the campaign will be at least as educational as those slick Range Resources commercials that tell us how much a few of our fellow citizens have profited from natural gas royalties.

It would seem that this campaign is a waste of money here in Pittsburgh, since the state of Pennsylvania is already a wholly-owned subsidiary of the natural gas industry, and has given it the most industry-friendly legislation in the country. I guess if you're drilling for natural gas, you can never be too careful.

Elsewhere in the same newspaper, under “National Briefs,” I found an op-ed masquerading as a news article that might easily have been part of the Chamber of Commerce's new campaign. Under the headline, “Experts dispute fracking critics,” it carefully selects paragraphs from the beginning and near the end of this Associated Press article. The original article is already very pro-industry, using selective citation of research to brand several claims made by opponents of fracking as false. The edited version removes what little balance the original contained by removing the last two paragraphs, which report false statements by the natural gas industry.

What caught my eye was a reference to social psychology in order to justify the claim that fracking opponents have fallen victim to self-delusion. Political scientist Mark Lubell attributes the problem an “an actual psychological process” called motivated reasoning, in which people “insist on believing things that aren't true, in part because of feedback from other people who share their views.” 

As a psychological term, “motivated reasoning” is frustratingly vague. It tells us almost nothing about process. But it is true that, since Leon Festinger published A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance in 1957, social psychologists have conducted thousands of studies showing that people are more likely to accept information that supports their prior beliefs than information that contradicts them. Clearly this is something that we all do a lot of the time. Here's journalist Chris Mooney explaining motivated reasoning and explaining one of the processes involved.

Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler did four studies designed to test whether media reports can be expected to correct false beliefs. Participants read two mock news articles—a false claim, followed by an article which corrected it. For example, one study presented President George W. Bush's false claim from after the invasion of Iraq that Saddam Hussein had possessed weapons of mass destruction, followed by an article about the Duelfer Report that refuted that claim. All four studies found evidence of motivated reasoning, in that the corrections did not significantly reduce the original misperceptions in their overall sample.

More importantly, two of the studies found evidence of a “backfire effect,” in which the correction increased belief in the original false claim, among certain subgroups. Subjects were asked to classify themselves on a 7-point scale of liberalism-conservatism. In the WMD study described above, the liberals and centrists either corrected their false beliefs or were unchanged, but the conservatives became more extreme in their belief that WMDs had been found. However, this backfire effect failed to occur when the study was repeated.

The backfire effect was replicated, however, in a second study in which participants were first told that tax cuts would stimulate the economy and increase government revenue, and then told that research had shown this claim to be false. Again, it was the conservatives who increased their belief in the efficacy of tax cuts after being shown studies that found them to be ineffective. The fourth study was conducted in order to try to find a backfire effect among liberals. Subjects were falsely told that President Bush had completely banned stem cell research, and later correctly told that he had only banned federally-funding research, but allowed privately-funded research to continue. In this case, participants once again persevered in their original beliefs, but no backfire effect was found.

Here's Brendan Nyhan discussing this research and making some suggestions as to how journalists can correct their audience's false beliefs.

The Nyhan-Reifler studies seem to suggest that conservatives are more likely to engage in motivated reasoning than liberals. In fact, after reviewing the entire literature on this subject, Chris Mooney comes to this conclusion. However, we need to be extremely skeptical before accepting this hypothesis. It's certainly possible that liberals would show a backfire effect if the study involved an issue that was more central to their political ideology.

Here's the problem with the fracking article. It's far too easy to read the motivated reasoning literature selectively and use the concept as a weapon to attack your political opponents, thereby engaging in motivated reasoning about motivated reasoning. The claim of motivated reasoning should only be used when the argument someone is defending has been clearly refuted by the evidence. The AP article fails to distinguish between claims that are false and those that are merely unsubstantiated. A claim can be unsubstantiated if it has not been conclusively tested, or if the available evidence is mixed.

While it is certainly true that some opponents of fracking have made false or irresponsible accusations, the claims that fracking will contaminate the air or ground water, or that it will expose people to cancer-causing chemicals, are plausible and serious enough to justify independent—that is, not industry-funded—research at multiple locations. The argument that natural gas is a cleaner burning fuel than coal has been questioned by highly competent research. This debate is further complicated by the fact that it may take decades for conclusive evidence of some harms caused by fracking to emerge.

Meanwhile, we should not be surprised if our corporate media, which are heavily dependent on advertising by the fossil fuel companies, treat industry propanganda as if it were unbiased and accuse those who question it of motivated reasoning.

Who Pays?

The NCAA has taken time out from its primary task of trying to guarantee that the big-time college football and basketball programs it represents are able to benefit from free labor on the playing field. The sanctions imposed on Penn State seem intended to repair the image of college sports following the Sandusky scandal. Now that these punishments have been announced, let's look more closely at who is hurt by them.

Penn State has been fined $60 million, the money to go to child abuse prevention and treatment. In addition, the Big Ten athletic conference has taken away Penn State's share of bowl revenue for the next four years, another $13 million. Penn State has announced that the $60 million fine will be taken from the athletics reserve fund, the capital maintenance budget, and if necessary, an internal bond issue. The athletics reserve fund contains $17 million, so the majority will have to come from capital maintenance. The phrase “capital maintenance” does not appear in the online version of the 2012-13 Penn State budget. In general, capital maintenance refers to the amount of capital, either financial or physical, an institution wishes to maintain. My best guess is that they plan to spend less money maintaining their physical facilities, although their budget indicates that they already have a substantial backlog of deferred maintenance. At the present time, it's impossible to tell what percentage of the fine will ultimately be taken from the university's operating budget, and what percentage will come from private contributions.

Whenever a university announces that they're spending big bucks on a nonacademic project, they try to pacify students, faculty and the public by assuring us that the money will come only from private contributions. But given the relative ease with which universities can transfer funds one budgetary category to another, this is about as credible as the claim that proceeds from the state lottery “benefit senior citizens.” The athletics reserve fund, for example, could be temporarily drawn down, but quietly replenished a few years later when no one is paying attention. The fact that Penn State is a private university, not subject to Pennsylvania's sunshine law, makes budget manipulation easier. As they file into their delapidated classrooms or try to cope with the latest round of cuts to the “Paterno Library,” students and faculty might want to ask themselves what that $73 million would have been used for had it not been spent on paying the fine.

By the way, 14% of Penn State's operating budget comes from state appropriations. If all $73 million ultimately comes out of the operating budget, that means the citizens of Pennsylvania have just been fined $10.22 million by the NCAA and the Big Ten. I'm not sure what gives them the right to do that. I must have missed that meeting.

The number of new football scholarships at Penn State is reduced from 25 to 15 per year for the next five years. Obviously, this delivers a big hurt to a small number of prospective students on the football team.

There is a four year ban on Penn State bowl game appearances.

These last two punishments, along with the ruling that current football players may transfer to other universities and play football without the usual waiting period, will affect the competitiveness of the Penn State football team, since it will be less attractive to new recruits. This will have a negative ripple affect on the economy of central Pennsylvania, especially hotels, restaurants and bars, which depend on the football season for much of their revenue.

All of Penn State's wins from 1998 to 2012 are vacated. This primarily affects Joe Paterno's legacy. He will no longer be referred to as the winningest coach in the history of college football. I'm O. K. with that.

Penn State is placed on probation for five years. The consequences of this are unknown.

The primary losers appear to be the students and employees of Penn State and the citizens of Pennsylvania. None of these people have been specifically identified as folks whose behavior requires modification.

These penalties are not directly relevant to the NCAA's claim that Penn State's football culture had come to dominate the university, at the expense of academic and moral values. To address this issue, the university is required to take “other corrective actions,” including adopting some of the recommendations of the Freeh Report (“especially section 5.0”) and appointing a full-time athletics integrity monitor.

Section 5.0 of the recommendations chapter of the Freeh report, entitled “Athletic Department: Integration and Compliance,” deals with claim that it had been allowed to become a closed community, not subject to university rules and procedures. The section contains recommendations that are somewhat related to that claim, such as revising the organizational structure of the Athletic Department and ensuring that it is subordinate to the university's Athletic Compliance Office.

Section 1.0 is entitled “Penn State Culture,” but all it seems to do is appoint a large committee with representatives from all university interest groups to study the local culture and suggest changes.  (For an interesting take on the culture of the Alabama region of Pennsylvania, see this article by a former Penn State instructor.)

In my judgment, none of the NCAA directives address the real problem. Athletic Departments, especially men's football and basketball programs, have become directly involved in university fund-raising. They play a major role in entertaining wealthy alumni. The university becomes dependent on them. This gives them special access to these large contributors. When they don't get their way, coaches and athetic directors can threaten to go over the heads of administrators, including the President of the university, in order to influence university decisions. Administrators know this, so they comply with the Athletic Department's wishes.

Jerry Sandusky's behavior was tolerated for 14 years primarily because Coach Paterno was able to persuade his nominal bosses to look the other way. It's too bad we have no transcripts of their conversations, because I'm not sure “persuade” is the right word to use. Maybe he made them an offer they couldn't refuse.

Addendum

Sportswriter Dave Zirin has pointed out that neither the Freeh Report nor the NCAA have questioned the role that former Attorney General, now Governor, Tom Corbett played in delaying the prosecution of Jerry Sandusky. While the Attorney General's office began investigating Sandusky in 2009, he was not charged until November 2011. Corbett assigned only one or two—depending on whom you believe—staff members to conduct the investigation. Zirin argues that Corbett delayed charging Sandusky until after the 2010 gubernatorial election in order to avoid offending Central Pennsylvania's wealthy ruling class, on whom he was counting for political and financial support during the campaign. For example, he received $650,000 in political contributions just from board members of Second Mile, Sandusky's charitable foundation.

While Corbett has built a successful political career around prosecuting high profile political corruption, many would argue that he manipulated those prosecutions in a partisan manner. Corbett has stated that state legislators from both the Elephant and Jackass parties used taxpayer money for political purposes, but Corbett, an Elephant, ensured that the Jackasses took most of the blame by prosecuting them first with a series of highly publicized show trials, while allowing the Elephant defendants to quietly plead guilty later on.

How Do You Spell "Hypocrisy?"

Following the massacre of 12 people in an Aurora, Colorado movie theatre, President Obama condemned the killings, and said, “(T)he federal government stands ready to do everything necessary to bring whoever is responsible for this heinous crime to justice.” Here are the President's complete remarks.

While it is obvious that the defendant should be brought to justice, these remarks are hard to accept coming from a president who has involved the United States in a program of targeted assassination of suspected al-Qaeda members and sympathizers, including American citizens, without due process of law. Using unmanned aircraft, or drones, the program targets several countries, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. It could be argued that we are not engaged in a legal war with any of those countries, certainly not the last three, and that these are war crimes under international law. The drone program even bears some eerie similarities to the Aurora massacre. It unleashes sudden, violent death, on what often seem to be randomly selected innocent people. It is responsible for the death or maiming of unknown numbers—probably in the thousands—of innocent civilians.

During the eight-year presidency of Dick Cheney, the U. S. became a nation of torturers. Under President Obama, we have become, in Jeremy Scahill's words, “a nation of assassins.” Unlike the ethically-challenged behavior of the Bush administration, the drone program has escalated virtually without criticism from progressives.

Needless to say, the program is entirely futile as a way of fighting terrorism, since it instills deep hatred of the United States in the citizens of these countries. This guarantees that for every terrorist “leader” we kill, hundreds will stand ready to take their place.

The drone assassination program is presented in detail in a May 29 New York Times article by Jo Becker and Scott Shane. It describes President Obama as personally approving the selection of each target of so-called personality strikes, using biographical sketches on note cards, referred to by his aides as “baseball cards.” It's much easier to get on the other type of kill list—to become the target of a so-called signature strike. If you are a young man, you merely have to fit a vague profile of suspicious behavior. One source joked that a satellite photo of “three guys doing jumping jacks” is sufficient to label a location as a terrorist training camp.

One reason we don't know how many civilian casualties have resulted from the drone attacks is that the administration has developed a self-serving and deceptive definition of enemy combatants: all military-age males are assumed to be guilty “unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.” (Of course, no one looks for such evidence.)

How does the Obama administration square the summary execution of American citizens with the Constitution's guarantee of a fair trial? According to the Justice Department, the Fifth Amendment requirement of due process “could be satisfied by internal deliberations in the executive branch.”

Here is lawyer and journalist Glenn Greenwald discussing the targeted killing program, and Jeremy Scahill defending his claim that the United States is engaged in “murder.”

For a more thorough discussion of the drone program, I recommend Scahill's 40-minute speech at the Drone Summit in Washington, D. C., in April. Here is part one. You Tube will lead you to the remaining three parts. See also Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050, by Nick Turse and Tom Engelhardt.

It is widely speculated that the details of the drone program were leaked to the New York Times by administration sources in order to bolster the President's tough-guy image for the upcoming elections. Apparently, the Obama campaign thinks that Americans consider being a mass murderer an important qualification for the office. However, the article may have unintended consequences.

Becker and Shane make it clear that the President personally supervises every detail of the drone program, including the kill list. In the past, international war crimes tribunals have had difficulty establishing a clear link between the actions of national leaders and atrocities committed on their behalf, since they are usually separated by several layers of bureaucracy. This article supports the claim that President Obama is personally responsible for these assassinations. This could come back to haunt him after he leaves office. As is the case with Henry Kissinger and George W. Bush, Obama may have to refrain from most travel abroad, since he could be arrested at any time and charged with war crimes under international law.   

Freeh At Last

Former FBI Director Louis Freeh's Report accuses four powerful Penn State officials of “callous and shocking disregard” for the victims of now-convicted child abuser Jerry Sandusky. Football coach Joe Paterno seems to have persuaded the other three—athletic director Tim Curley, vice-president Gary Schultz, and president Graham Spanier—not to report the accusations against Sandusky to the authorities, in order to avoid negative publicity for the university and its football program. For almost 14 years, they did not take any action to protect children on their campus.

Published excerpts from the Freeh Report reminded me of findings from research on the effects of power. In psychological studies, power is manipulated either by creating a heirarchical relationship to accomplish a laboratory task, or by priming the concept of power by reminding subjects of past incidents in which they had a lot of or very little power.

The four men who made the decisions in the Sandusky case “exhibited a striking lack of empathy” for the least powerful people in this incident—Sandusky's (at the time) alleged victims.

“There is no indication that Spanier, Schultz, Paterno, Curley or any other leader at Penn State made any effort to determine the identity of the child in the shower or whether the child had been harmed.”

First, an exercise. As quickly as you can, with the index finger of your dominant hand, draw a capital letter “E” on your forehead.

Did you draw the “E” as if you yourself were reading it, or as though a person facing you was reading it? Social psychologist Adam Galinsky has found that drawing the “E” in the other-oriented direction is the dominant response, but when people are made to feel more powerful—in this case, by recalling an incident in which they had power over another individual—they are three times more likely to draw the “E” in the self-oriented direction than when they are made to feel less powerful. This is an exercise in perspective-taking. High power people are less likely to take another person's perspective, which in turn makes them more likely to show in-group favoritism and to stereotype other people.

Susan Fiske has studied the consequences of high and low power for people's perceptions of those with whom they interact. She defines power as control over other people's outcomes. People pay attention to those who control their outcomes, in order to predict and attempt to influence what is going to happen to them. As a result, powerless people form fairly detailed impressions of the powerful. On the other hand, powerful people have no incentive to form accurate impressions of their subordinates, since no important outcomes are at stake. To the extent that powerful people think about their subordinates at all, they tend to stereotype them rather than treat them as unique individuals. Thus attention flows upward in a social hierarchy. The secretaries know more about the bosses than the bosses know about the secretaries.

In a clear demonstration of the effect of power on its holders, Goodwin and Fiske gave college participants the power to evaluate summer job applications by high school students. The researchers varied the weight given to the participants' evaluations in the final decision. The more power these participants had, the less attention they paid to the qualifications of the applicants. It should be noted that this effect can be reversed by explicitly reminding powerholders of their humanitarian values, but these ethical prompts are unlikely to be present in everyday life.

Although the Penn State decision makers were not concerned with the welfare of possible victims, they were concerned with the reputation of the university. Ultimately, however, they disregarded these concerns.

“[Mr. Spanier] concluded with: 'The only downside for us is if the message isn't '
"heard" and acted upon, and then we become vulnerable for not having reported it. But that can be assessed down the road.'”

Anderson and Galinsky reported five studies showing that people primed to take a high-power perspective had a more optimistic perception of dangers in the real world, recommended more risky courses of action in hypothetical dilemmas, and reported behaving in a more risky manner in actual negotiations. Their final study shows that the effect of power on risk-taking is mediated by optimistic risk perceptions. Regardless of what Mr. Spanier meant by “down the road,” the actual course of events suggests that they waited to engage in damage control until it was much too late.

“(T)here is an overemphasis on 'The Penn State Way' as an approach to decision-making, a resistance to outside perspectives, and an extensive focus on athletics that can, if not recognized, negatively impact the University's reputation as a progressive institution.”

Even before this scandal, the general perception was that Joe Paterno was more powerful than his nominal bosses, including the university president. The Freeh report describes the athletic department as a closed community that followed its own rules rather than those of the university. In a 2007 incident in which 15 football players participated in a downtown brawl, Paterno told players not to cooperate with the campus judicial board or they would be kicked off the team, and ultimately decided on a ridiculously lenient punishment for them (picking up litter at the stadium).

I don't know any university faculty member who doesn't think that athletic departments, especially men's football and basketball programs, have far too much influence on college campuses. They use their power to bully not only their own players, but faculty and administrators as well. They provide entertainment for the students and the community, but their activities are largely irrelevant to the educational goals of the university. Because most athletic departments lose money, they are a drain on resources that should be used for academic purposes. They often involve the university in ethical violations, including grade-fixing and covering up criminal conduct.

There has been discussion about an appropriate “punishment” for the Penn State football program. Supporters point out that suspending the team would punish the wrong people, since current and future Penn State players and coaches are not guilty of any wrongdoing. Rather than focusing on punishment, I would suggest that Penn State enact structural reforms to bring the athletic department under university control. This should include removing coaches and athletic directors from direct participation in university fund-raising. 

The great god Joe-Pa hails a cab:  This statue must come down.

 All rights reserved by Catriona Cornett

A final note: Regular readers of this blog will recall than I am not convinced that Jerry Sandusky is guilty of all the crimes of which he was convicted, due to the suggestive questioning techniques used by the Pennsylvania state police. However, regardless of his degree of guilt or innocence, it is obvious that Penn State administrators should have reported the charges to authorities rather than covering them up.

States of Confusion

Medicaid expansion is a critical part of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Of the approximately 30 million people who are currently uninsured, but will be if the ACA is fully implemented, fully half of them—the poorest half—will be insured through the Medicaid expansion.

Traditional Medicaid is jointly administered by the state and federal governments. The Feds set some basic rules. All children are covered if their family makes less than the federal poverty level. Children under six are covered up to 133% of the poverty line. But the states set the eligibility rules for adults. In most states, if you don't have children, you can't qualify for Medicaid no matter how poor you are. In states like Texas and Louisiana, parents only qualify for Medicaid if they make less than 40% of the federal poverty level—$4850 a year for two parents with a single child. Other states are more generous. Massachusetts, thanks to Romneycare, covers all adults up to 133% of the poverty line. But on the whole, Medicaid as currently implemented is not much of a safety net for the poor. Right now, the federal government pays on average 57% of the cost of traditional Medicaid—between 50% and 75%, depending state eligibility rules.

The ACA expands Medicaid by making everyone—children and adults—eligible for Medicaid if their family income is 133% of the poverty level or lower. This is expensive, so the Feds agreed to pay most of the cost. In 2014, they will pay 100%. This drops to 95% in 2017, and to 90% in 2020. Notice that states that whose current Medicaid eligibility rules are relatively stingy—which tend to be the states with the highest percentage of uninsured citizens—stand to gain more money per capita when from the Medicaid expansion than states whose eligibility rules are generous. Texans will make out like bandits if they accept the money, while Massachusetts residents will get nothing, since they are already covered up to 133% of the poverty line.

This is another example of a little-known source of inequality in our national politics. As I previously pointed out, conservative states—states that are more rural, have a lower median income, and tend to vote Republican—receive more money back from the federal government than they pay in taxes. Liberal states get shortchanged. In fact, you could argue that much of U. S. domestic policy involves a redistribution of income in which the “blue states” subsidize the “red states.” (Note: They're not grateful.)

Enter the Supremes. The ACA required states to implement the Medicaid expansion. If they refused, the federal government threatened to withhold its contribution to traditional Medicare. Chief Justice John Roberts, in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, ruled that this was coercive, and that the states may opt out of Medicaid expansion. Six Republican governors have already said that they will refuse to comply, and several others are threatening to do so. Here is the map. The chart below it shows that, with the exception of Wisconsin, the states that plan to refuse the Medicaid expansion have a higher percentage of uninsured citizens, or in other words, have more to gain from it. This will not only frustrate the intent of the ACA, but will deny medical help to many of the Americans who need it most.

To make matters worse, some Republican governors have announced that they are exploring the possibility of dropping out of traditional Medicaid as well. They interpret the Supremes' decision to mean that they can opt out of any federal program that requires the states to pay part of the cost. The states' reaction to Medicaid expansion makes it very clear that attempting to implement health care reform at the state level is an exercise in futility.

The usual reason given for why conservatives refuse to expand Medicaid is said to be conservative ideology. This is most charitably described as opposition to big government, but when applied to health care, it sounds suspiciously like an unwillingness to help one's fellow citizens who can't afford medical care, either because they are poor or because their family is struck by catastrophic illness. Are there rational reasons for refusing to expand Medicaid?

• The 5% (in 2017) to 10% (in 2020) of the cost of Medicaid expansion is not exactly pocket change. States may be justifiably worried about the cost.
• The “woodwork effect.” Many Americans who are eligible for Medicaid in their state don't apply for it. They may think it's not worth the trouble. However, the publicity surrounding the Medicaid expansion and the threat of a fine for violating the individual mandate may persuade more eligible people to sign up. The states will then be on the hook for whatever part of the cost they would have had to cover under traditional Medicare.

Many health care policy experts, however, think that the financial logic of expanding Medicaid is strong enough to overcome any resistance due to ideology. Here are some of the points they make.

• Not only will it be difficult for states to turn down “free money,” the citizens of those states that turn down the Medicaid expansion will be paying for it anyway through their federal taxes. Their money will go to other states that have accepted the deal (partially reversing the flow of money from blue states to red).
• As noted above, the states whose governors have been most vocal about opting out of Medicaid expansion are the ones that stand to gain the most from it, since they have a higher percentage of uninsured citizens.
• Uninsured citizens in these states will continue to show up at hospital emergency rooms. Their care will be paid for through cost shifting. Costs are shifted in several ways.
• Some of the cost is paid by those who have health insurance. Their premiums are higher in order to pay the cost of treating people without insurance.
• Part of the cost is paid for through federal, state and local taxes, which provide emergency health care for the poor. The Urban Institute estimated that in 2008, state and local governments spent $10.6 billion dollars providing emergency care for the uninsured. However, beginning in 2014, the federal government will no longer subsidize emergency care, so the burden will fall more heavily on state and local government. This cost alone will probably be greater than the cost to the states of Medicaid expansion.
• Finally, part of the cost is shifted to hospitals through what is called “forced charity”—uncompensated medical care for the uninsured. (Of course, they get some of this money back by charging you or your insurance company $28 for a box of tissues while you're in the hospital.)
• Low income citizens and the public interest groups that represent them will protest the denial of coverage to hundreds of thousands of poor and sick people. However, research at the federal level shows that the attitudes of poor people have either no influence, or a slight negative effect, on public policy. This is probably true at the state level as well, but this remains to be demonstrated.
• Most importantly, hospitals and doctors were expecting to have many more customers due to Medicaid expansion. They've already agreed to reduce their reimbursement rates under the ACA, in anticipation of these higher profits. They're   also not happy about forced charity. Health care providers are powerful lobbying groups who spend a lot of money paying off governors and state legislators. They won't take this loss of revenue lying down.

What will happen? Nothing, until after the election. Given how unpopular the ACA is, anything the Republicans can do to resist it now will probably help them in November. If Romney defeats Obama and the Elephants gain control of the Senate, it's probably all over for health care reform for at least a decade.

If that doesn't happen and the ACA survives, it seems inevitable that all the states will eventually agree to expand Medicaid. However, that will take a long time and a lot of people will die while they're waiting for it to happen.

My Enemy's Enemy

The headline at the top of the front page of this morning's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette said, “Romney booed before NAACP.” His speech was described as “a blunt pitch,” and as “offering tough policy prescriptions that are unpopular with [African-Americans].” You've probably seen this video of Romney being booed on the nightly newscasts. What's going on?

Although the June polls show substantial drops in support for Obama among almost all demographic groups, he still has a huge lead among African-Americans. It's unlikely that Romney hoped to win many converts among those attending yesterday's NAACP convention. The real target of Romney's speech was the general public who read and watched yesterday's news.

In 1946, Fritz Heider, one of the pioneers of social psychology, proposed a theory of cognitive balance. He pointed out that people prefer both their interpersonal relationships and their cognitive structures to be in a state of balance, or consistency, with one another. We expect to like and dislike the same people as our friends, and to share their positive and negative attitudes. To see how this works in interpersonal relations, consider a three-person social network consisting of Alice, Betty and Carol. If Alice likes Betty, Alice likes Carol, and Betty likes Carol, the system is in balance.

A + B, A + C, B + C

It is also balanced if Alice likes Betty and dislikes Carol, and Betty also dislikes Carol.

A + B, A – C, B – C.

On the other hand, the network is unbalanced if Alice likes Betty and Carol, but Betty dislikes Carol; or if all three of them dislike one another.

A + B, A + C, B – C; and A – B, A – C, B – C

A simple mathematical rule for determining balance is to multiply the signs of the relationships. If the product is positive, the system is balanced [(+) (–) (–) = +], and if it is negative, the system is unbalanced [(+)(+)(–) = –]. Systems that are unbalanced are unstable, and there is cognitive pressure to balance them by changing one of the three relationships.

The system also makes predictions about new and developing relationships. For example, suppose Alice and Betty have a mutual relationship, Alice has an attitude toward Carol, but Betty and Carol are unacquainted. If Alice and Betty are friends and Alice dislikes Carol, Betty can balance the system by disliking Carol. Among the three other possibilities is this one: If Alice and Betty dislike one another and Alice dislikes Carol, there is a tendency for Betty and Carol to be attracted to one another. This latter principle is illustrated by the saying “my enemy's enemy is my friend.” The U. S. and the Soviet Union were allies during World War II not because we liked Communism or Stalin, but because the Soviets were also fighting against Nazi Germany.

This may shed some light on Romney's motive for attending the NAACP convention and going out of his way to antagonize those in attendance—including referring to the Affordable Care Act as “Obamacare,” which many of Obama's supporters find insulting. I suggest he went there expecting and hoping to be booed, knowing that the corporate media would act as a megaphone for any rude treatment he received.

There are many Republicans and Independents who are unenthusiastic about Romney. Tea Party members, for example, probably would have preferred a different candidate. Many of these folks also have strong attitudes toward African-Americans, and they aren't very pretty. A University of Washington survey finds that Tea Party membership predicts a 25% increase in racial resentment, even after controlling for conservatism and Republican partisanship—which are both also predictive of racial resentment. If black people are disliked (my enemy), and if black people booed Romney (my enemy's enemy), some of these undecided folks may have found a new friend. Of course, yesterday's events might also have energized members of the Republican base who were already committed to Romney.

In a Fox News interview later in the day, Romney indicated that the boos he received were not a surprise. “We expected that, of course,” he said. The NAACP didn't let him down. Take a look at his facial expression as he was being booed.

The "Job Killers," Part 2

The American Association for the Advancement of Science was kind enough to send me a free issue of Science last month, in the hope that I'd subscribe. I didn't—too much “hard” science, in both senses of the word—but I found an interesting evaluation research study by economists David Levine, Michael Toffel and Matthew Johnson on the effect of government safety inspections on worker injuries. Unfortunately, the study is gated.

As noted in Part 1 of this post, corporate spokespersons and conservative politicians often label government-enforced health and safety regulations—along with environmental protections, health insurance, and taxes—as “job killers.” Opponents claim that these laws seldom actually prevent injuries, and their implementation is so expensive that they make companies unprofitable, leading to plant closures and layoffs, and hurting workers in the long run.

There is a large existing literature on the subject, but it is inconsistent and inconclusive. Studies usually look for changes in injury rates from before to after an inspection. But workplaces are not randomly chosen for inspection; they are usually chosen due to recent accidents or safety complaints. If some of these accidents are actually random events, there could be an apparent improvement that is merely regression to the mean. In addition, inspectors often find incomplete safety records and require better record keeping. This can lead to the false perception of an increase in accidents after the inspection.

Fortunately for research purposes, between 1996 and 2006, California's Occupational Safety and Health Administration, lacking the resources to inspect all workplaces, randomly selected 409 workplaces from high injury industries for inspection. The authors matched them with 409 control firms, each one from the same industry and region of California as an inspected plant. They counted the number of injuries and the cost of these injuries during the period from four years before the inspection to four years after. They also looked at several measures intended to determine whether inspections had the unintended effect of being job killers: firm survival, credit ratings, total sales, number of employees, and payroll.

They found that the inspections reduced injuries by an average of 9.4% in comparison to the control group—not a trivial difference, especially if you work at one of these plants. Workers' compensation costs were reduced by 26%. The difference was significant for both major injuries (costing more than $2000) and minor ones. The improvement was not just temporary. The reduction in injuries was greater in the third and fourth years after the inspection than in the first two years.

There was no evidence of job loss or any other negative effect of the inspections on the competitiveness of these firms. The plants selected for inspection were no more likely to go out of business, and they did not have lower credit ratings, sales, numbers of employees, or payrolls, when compared to the control plants. In fact, all five of these measures favored the treatment group over the control group, although none of the differences were statistically significant.

This is just one study, but it appears to be a good one. It's worth bearing in mind the next time some lobbyist or politician claims that health and safety laws, and their enforcement, are “job killers.”

Does Propaganda Work?

First of all, before you read any further, you have to take this pop quiz on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) written by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Finished yet? O.K., now you can read Kaiser's analysis of the results. You'll find that less than 1% of respondents got all ten items correct. I was one of them, which is why you people should listen to me when I'm talking!  ;)  You'll also find that people who got fewer correct answers were (among other things) more likely to be Republicans, watchers of Fox News, and in favor of repealing the law.

Kevin Drum has constructed the following chart. He points out that there has been more conservative disinformation regarding the five items that more people answered incorrectly than the other five. This suggests that the right wing and their media enablers have been effective in misleading the public about the ACA.

I'm not sure I buy Drum's argument, since he has no data on how frequently false claims were made. I don't recall hearing that much about the nonexistent mandate that small businesses offer coverage to their employees, for example. Of course, there have been more complaints about the individual mandate than any other provision of the ACA, but in this case, the conservatives have not lied about it. There really is an individual mandate, although they have neglected to point out how small a percentage of Americans will be affected by it.

In order to get these results, you need more than just conservative propaganda. You also need corporate news media that fail to correct it, media that present these false claims as a he-said-she-said “controversy,” without explaining who is right and who is wrong.

Update

Thanks to Paul Ricci for pointing out that paid advertisements have almost certainly been a major factor in spreading public misinformation about the ACA. On June 20, The New York Times added up the expenditures to that date.

The amount spent attacking the ACA ($235 million) was 3.4 times the amount spent defending it ($69 million). Almost all the pro-ACA ads were from the Department of Health and Human Service ($47 million)--ads which the Times describes as “bland, explaining aspects of the law.” The anti-ACA ads come largely from the usual cast of Elephants who have emerged as major players in the post-Citizens United ad wars—the U. S. Chamber of Commerce ($27 million), Karl Rove's Crossroads USA ($18 million), etc. As part of the captive audience for these ads, I would not describe them as bland. The anti-ACA ads play to people's fears about government takeovers (“socialism”), rising deficits, and the rationing of care.

The anti-ACA ads have played primarily in swing states such as Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio, suggesting that they are, in part, an early start to the presidential campaign. I live in Pittsburgh, the fourth largest market for these ads ($7.6 million). Philadelphia, at $7.9 million, is the second largest market.

The "Job Killers," Part 1

Students of persuasion from Aristotle to Adolf Hitler have advised propagandists that statements can acquire the illusion of truth through repetition. Let's suppose you hear a plausible statement, but you are unsure whether it is true, i.e., “Greenland has about 50,000 inhabitants” or “Zachary Taylor was the first president to die in office.” Research in social psychology has shown that the more frequently you are exposed to such statements, the more likely you are to judge them to be true. A recent statistical analysis of 51 studies found this “illusion of truth effect” to be highly reliable. The effect is largely unconscious. People judge familiar statements to be true even when they can't remember whether they've heard them before.

Here's a statement I'll bet you've heard quite often in the past few years: “Government regulations are job killers.” Peter Dreier and Christopher Martin, Professors of Political Science and Communication respectively, did a content analysis in which they looked at every instance of the phrase “job killer” in the Associated Press, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post from 1984 to 2011. There were 381 articles that contained the phrase “job killer” and its variations. (If you think that's not very many, remember that stories from these four organizations are widely reprinted. The Associated Press alone serves 1700 newspapers and 500 radio and TV stations. The authors cite one article that received 12,800 citations.)

The first thing they noted is that use of this phrase has become more frequent in recent years. In fact, it increased dramatically after Barack Obama took office. From the first three years of the George W. Bush administration to the first three years of the Obama administration, appearances of “job killer” increased by 1156%; that is, there were about 11.5 times as many “job killer” stories.

Most of the accusations focused on federal (65%) and state (12%) government policies designed to regulate business. The top four policies claimed to be job killers were environmental regulations (18%), tax policies (17%), health care reform (10%), and wage policies (8%), usually proposals to increase the minimum wage.

Not surprisingly, the most common sources in stories claiming that something was a job killer were Republican politicians (42%) and business spokespersons (19%). But the third most frequent source was the authors themselves. 17% of the time, the newspaper used the phrase in articles or editorials without attributing it to any source, suggesting that the claim that government regulations are job killers is part of the conventional wisdom. The Wall Street Journal was more likely than the other organizations to use the phrase without attribution.

91.6% of the articles alleging that a government policy was or would be a job killer did not present any evidence to support that claim, either from the source or from the article's author. In the 8.4% of cases where evidence was presented, the most frequent types reported were anecdotes (3.4%), quantitative data (1.6%), a study (1%), and the opinion of an economist (.8%). The authors did not find a single case in which journalists attempted on their own to investigate the veracity of a job-killing claim.

In cases where a source claimed that a policy was a job killer, reporters provided a counterclaim from an opposition source only 7% of the time. I find this especially noteworthy. Even when claims have broad empirical support, such as the evidence for global warming, reporters usually engage in false balancing by citing the opinions of a small minority of global warming skeptics. However, claims of job-killing seem to be exempt from the norm of balance which requires journalists to present both sides of the issue. Are other conservative statements similarly exempt? Does labeling a statement “controversial” only apply to claims made by liberals?

Concerns about unemployment are higher during economic hard times, so you might expect articles about job killers to increase during a recession. However, there was no correlation. The only historical variable that predicted job-killing claims was the occupant of the White House. They were up during Democrat administrations and down when Republicans were in power.

Dreier and Martin cite journalism textbooks and the Society of Professional Journalists' Code of Ethics, which state that it is a reporter's job to verify what newsmakers say. This advice is apparently now archaic. To report that a politician's or businessman's statement is true or false risks being accused of bias, especially at this historical moment, when the truth appears to have a liberal bias.

Failure of reporters to investigate the claims of politicians has the obvious consequence of making it more difficult for the public to determine whether their statements are true. It also means that politicians pay no penalty for lying, since they are never called out for it. This would seem to encourage further falsehoods. Perlstein has argued American politics has become a fact-free zone where lying has become the new normal.

It's obvious that the job killer meme—along with the equally suspect claim that the wealthy are “job creators”—has become a powerful weapon in the hands of Elephant politicians and their allies in the corporate media. Few journalists seemed concerned when the House of Representatives passed an attempt to kill the Affordable Care Act (ACA) entitled “Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Act.” In fact, an analysis by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicted that the ACA would not lead to significant layoffs, only voluntary retirements. Politifact rated House majority leader Eric Cantor's statement that Obamacare was a job killer as “false” for that reason.

To what extent do government policies protecting workers, consumers or the environment actually lead to job loss? It's hard to say, since there hasn't been a lot of good research. One policy that has been extensively studied is the minimum wage, where research shows that increasing the minimum wage does not increase unemployment. For another example, see Part 2 of this post.