Henry Aaron, of Brookings, has a column today in which he purports to demonstrate that federal spending isn’t a problem.  His method is to pose four true or false questions, assert that most people would answer “true” to one or more of them, and then explain why all are false, thereby showing how ill-informed people are.  If Aaron is going to write a column where he proclaims other peoples’ ignorance, then he ought to make sure that his own analysis isn’t flawed.  The first question he poses is: “[t]he federal government is spending a larger share of national income than at any time since World War II – true or false?”  His answer is as follows:

Let’s start with government spending. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the Federal Government will spend 21.7 percent of GDP next year under current policy. Were the U.S. economy operating at capacity, that share would be less than 20.6 percent, because output would be higher and spending for such items as unemployment insurance would be lower. For the preceding three decades government spending averaged 21.1 percent of national output. In brief, the numbers flatly contradict the assertion that spending is “out of control.”

Taking his numbers at face value, Aaron puts forth two facts in his response:

1. Over the last three decades, average spending was 21.1% of GDP; and

2. Next year, under current policies, the government will spend 21.7% of GDP.

The only logical conclusion, based on these numbers, is that the response to his first question is “true.”  To arrive at his “false” conclusion, Aaron has to insert a counterfactual – that spending would be 20.6% of GDP if the U.S. economy was operating at full capacity.  This is a ridiculous argument.  One could just as easily say that spending would only be 10% of GDP if the economy grew by a factor of two.  That may be a true statement, but it is certainly irrelevant to answering the question of whether actual spending next year will be higher or lower than the thirty year average.  The answer to that question, as Aaron so succinctly demonstrates above, is “true.”

Chuck Thompson at the New Republic has a piece on the case before the Supreme Court regarding the voting rights act.  Its basic conclusion is that there is no way to prove that the South is more racist than the North.  The legal implication of that is clear – provisions of the Voting Rights Act that were designed to keep overly-racist states from using their power to suppress the vote of minorities can no longer be justified.  So far, so good.  However, in a turn at the end, Thompson (author of Better Off Without ‘Em: A Northern Manifesto for Southern Secession”) implies that the VRA should be kept around just so we as a country can show we disapprove of racism:

The argument here isn’t that that the North doesn’t have its own voting problems, or its own dubious pols, or even, in the case of New York’s Dov Hikind, pols who pose for dubious pictures. But so long as Southern officials like McConnell insist on clinging to their symbols of oppression, and so long as the majority of voters keep electing guys like him to some of the highest offices in their state governments, they’re going to have to live with being seen as the Michael Jordan of racism, even if they hung up that jersey long ago. And, like every other superstar who keeps begging for the limelight—by bringing cases to the Supreme Court or stoking Confederate nostalgia with bumper stickers and t-shirts—they’re going to have to get used to the fact that rest of the country can’t help but feeling a need to keep an eye on them. In that regard, the Voting Rights Act is a symbol, too.

Finding ways to show our disapproval of racism is good.  However, willfully trampling on states’ and citizens’ rights in the absence of a compelling Constitutional reason for doing so is not.  The law should never be used to deny the privileges and rights that all Americans are equally entitled to exercise without a clear and compelling justification, which must be grounded in a Constitutional imperative.  Merely showing that we, as a country, disapprove of the views of rascists in no way rises to that level.