Deceptive half truths from Pew Research Center

The Pew Research Center is supposed to be an organization you can trust. They are routinely cited on NPR. They are a non-profit. They claim to be non-partisan. As cynical as I am, I never had reason to distrust them...until now.

Drew DeSilver, a senior writer at Pew, writes a story titled, "High-income Americans pay most income taxes, but enough to be 'fair'?". Given the title, readers might expect the author to actually answer that question, but DeSilver doesn't even try.

He starts out with a nice chart showing the composition of government revenue since 1934. It's interesting, but with regard to income tax revenue as a percentage of government revenue, not much has changed post WWII. However, please note that this does not mean that income tax rates haven't changed over that time period--more on that later.

After a bit about corporate taxation, which is tangential to the question posed in the title, he presents his second chart, "Who Pays Income Taxes? The Rich, Mostly". What a surprise! The people with the most income pay the most income tax!

DeSilver then diverges into a discussion of payroll taxes, which again is tangential to the income tax queston posed in the title, and then concludes that "the U.S. tax system as a whole is progressive." As to whether the overall tax system is fair, something at least close to the question proposed in the title, he waffles with a milquetoast some-say-yes and some-say-no.

As a reader, what the hell am I supposed to make of this? What I make of it is that DeSilver wants to slap the "progressive" label on our tax system to imply that the status quo is acceptable, or at least not "unfair".

The problem is DeSilver does not address the question in proper historical context, and I think he does this deliberately. Consider a few things omitted from his article:

1. A chart of effective income tax rates over time for varying levels of income. Top tax rates used to be far higher than they are today. 
2. A chart showing income over time in deciles. The rich keep getting richer.
3. A chart showing the income tax composition (earned income and unearned income) over time for varying levels of income. The poor generally have no unearned income, while it now makes makes up a majority for the wealthy.
4. A chart showing tax rates over time for earned income (wages) and unearned income (interest, dividends, and capital gains). Tax rates are historically low on unearned income, which favors the rich.

I claim DeSilver deliberately omits this information, because he doesn't seem to be a bad writer. If ten journalism students were asked to do a report on income taxes in America, it seems highly unlikely that even one of them would simultaneously omit all four of these points. I also expect that DeSilver has an editor who signed off on this, which indicts the Pew Research Center. They may not be publishing outright lies, but they're not publishing the outright truth either.

Double standards on torture

McClatchy recently published a story about a suspected Pinochet-era torturer who had been working for the US government as recently as 2014. Clearly, the angle being pushed is that Americans should be outraged that a foreigner who might have been a torturer 40 years ago in Chile was working for the US government.

If that's the case, McClatchy might be interested in some more recent history. Not so long ago, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report that documents torture conducted by Americans and our foreign agents during the ongoing war on terror. Other than Lyndie England (of Abu Ghraib dog leash fame) and her ex-fiance, no one is in jail. A few people higher up the chain were demoted, but didn't lose their jobs. The few that did lose their jobs (Dick Cheney and John Woo for example), only lost them due to the change in administrations.

It seems safe to say that there are hundreds of people currently working in the US government that were complicit in torture. Not just the torturers themselves, but the officials who sanctioned it, the medical staff that consulted, and everyone else that tried to keep it a secret. Maybe McClatchy can get to work on that story, unless torture is only an issue when foreigners do it.

Reporting on Snowden

Mainstream American media sucks. I've come to terms with that. But, it's frustrating when even the usually-non-sucky media sucks. For instance, Dana Milbank, who usually doesn't suck (even though he works for The Washington Post, which does), writes this about Edward Snowden.

Snowden undermines his own cause in the U.S. At the start, Snowden's revelations to the Guardian and The Post promised to put him in the distinguished company of Daniel Ellsberg and others who exposed government wrongdoing. But rather than come home and face trial -- giving the nation the debate he claimed to seek about assaults on Americans' privacy -- he has allowed the story to become all about his life as a fugitive.” [all bold mine :c]

Get that? Snowden has "undermined his own cause" and "allowed" the story to become all about him. Yes, clearly that's what's happening here because Snowden has the power to control the story now that he has replaced Dana Milbank as a columnist at The Washington Post. Oh, wait, that hasn't happened? Then, I have no idea what the hell Milbank is talking about.

If anyone is undermining Snowden's cause, it's people like Milbank, who write things like this:

I still believe that Snowden was justified in leaking information about the NSA’s snooping. The administration’s collusion with the congressional intelligence committees had denied Americans the public debate they deserved about the trade-offs between security and privacy.

Milbank says this, yet he chooses to write about Snowden undermining his cause instead of digging into "the administration’s collusion with the congressional intelligence committees." By doing so, Milbank himself continues to deny "Americans the public debate they deserved about the trade-offs between security and privacy."

It's a well worn path. McClatchy, which usually doesn't suck too much -- they did some great reporting on Iraq -- also chooses to write about Snowden the cartoon character, rather than the secrets he revealed, because keeping up with "many thousands of words" would be "difficult". Seriously.

With many thousands of words written about Snowden from all over the world, it’s difficult to keep up with his own ever-changing story, much less keep track of his piecemeal disclosures of a sweeping U.S. surveillance program.

Wow. This is a major American newspaper admitting that it's just too difficult to wade through all the documents, so they're just going to cover Snowden's travel plans. If McClatchy really wants to "keep track of his piecemeal disclosures of a sweeping U.S. surveillance program," they might want to hire, or at least read Marcy Wheeler. She is single handedly doing the difficult work that The Washington Post, McClatchy, and the rest of the mainstream media can't or won't.

Missing the point

In response to Edward Snowden's revelations of our domestic spying programs, supporters are rushing to defend the programs by highlighting terrorist plots that were disrupted because of the program. One of these success stories was the Mumbai attack that resulted in 160 deaths, which is a weird way of defining success, but that's been covered by others. Others have also pointed out that despite the occasional success stories, we've had failures like the Boston Marathon bombing. It seems, at best, we have a domestic spying program that sometimes succeeds in stopping terrorist attacks.

But, whether or not these programs occasionally stop terrorist attacks is not the point. The Constitution contains The Fourth Amendment, which states:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

There's no clause that says the president or congress can ignore the fourth amendment just because they've succeeded in scaring the people about low probability events and have expensive tools that might prevent some of those events. That is the point.

Bad Journalist Feels Sympathy for Bad Doctors

This CNN Money article about doctors going broke has been making the rounds online. Even from the little snippet on Facebook, the story seemed dubious. After reading the whole thing, I'm reassured that my bullshit detector is still well calibrated. I'm not sure which is more disturbing--the shoddy journalism or the shady doctors.

The article starts out with this:

Doctors in America are harboring an embarrassing secret: Many of them are going broke. This quiet reality, which is spreading nationwide, is claiming a wide range of casualties, including family physicians, cardiologists and oncologists.

At this point, a competent journalist would include some sort of data to back up those rather extraordinary claims. A competent editor would demand such evidence before publishing the story. Exactly how many doctors are going broke? How are you measuring this nationwide spread? Unfortunately, Parija Kavilanz is not a competent journalist, and CNN Money is lacking competent editors, so I'll have to step in.

Based on the evidence presented, the number of doctors in America who are going broke is 3. The claim that this "quiet reality" is spreading nationwide is because those 3 are comprised of 1 doctor in Pennsylvania + 1 doctor in Minnesota + 1 doctor in Nevada. The claim that this quiet reality "is claiming a wide range of casualties, including family physicians, cardiologists and oncologists" is because those 3 are comprised of 1 family physician + 1 cardiologist + 1 oncologist. No wonder their reality is so quiet.

The article is clearly aimed at generating sympathy for doctors whose Medicare reimbursement rates have fallen, yet CNN Money does a piss-poor job of this by their selection of doctors. Far from making me sympathetic, the thought of these so-called professionals going broke makes me rejoice.

One of the three doctors is an oncologist. His problem:

He owes drug companies $1.6 million, which he wasn't reimbursed for.

What? That seems strange. Why would the oncologist owe money to the drug companies?

Until the mid-2000's, drugs sales were big profit generators for oncologists. In oncology, doctors were allowed to profit from drug sales. So doctors would buy expensive cancer drugs at bulk prices from drugmakers and then sell them at much higher prices to their patients. In 2005, Medicare revised the reimbursement guidelines for cancer drugs, which effectively made reimbursements for many expensive cancer drugs fall to less than the actual cost of the drugs.

Oh. Who knew that oncologists were allowed to profit from the drugs they prescribed to cancer patients? No conflict of interest there. For example, surely a doctor wouldn't prescribe a Pfizer drug over a Merck drug just because he had a warehouse full of bulk-rate Pfizer drugs. After all, medicine is a noble and honorable profession.

Now, after years of gouging his cancer patients...his CANCER patients!...he's complaining because he got stuck with a warehouse full of drugs whose street value dropped.

"I grew up in that system. I was spending $1.5 million a month on buying treatment drugs."

Notice the sense of entitlement. He grew up in a corrupt system, so it's just unfair to change it now -- as if the unethical conflict of interest was forced upon him, rather than greedily embraced.

The family practice doctor from rural Nevada is nearly as bad. His solution to his financial problem, in his own words, is to intentionally compromise the level of service provided to his patients.

"I will see more patients, but I won't check all of their complaints at one time," he explained. "If I do, insurance will bundle my reimbursement into one payment." Patients will have to make repeat visits -- an arrangement that he acknowledges is "inconvenient." "This system pits doctor against patient," he said. "But it's the only way to beat the system and get paid."

He admits it's "inconvenient" for the patient, but beating the system and getting paid--that's what it's about.

These two are perfect examples of why our health care system needs massive reform. If doctors like these are going bankrupt, we just might be making progress. If we ever see drug company profits merely approaching single digits, we'll really be getting somewhere.