I’m finally catching up on articles I’ve been meaning to write for a long time and this one comes from a New York Times Op-Ed piece which was written last June but which I discovered more recently.  It can be found here. It describes a phenomenon known as “source amnesia”, which serves as yet another example of how none of us are nearly as smart, objective, or discerning as we think we are.

Most basically, source amnesia is just the idea that its much easier to remember a particular nugget of information, than it is to remember the context or source of that information, especially if its information we use, think about, or hear often.  For example where did you first learn that the gas pedal was on the right and the brake on the left?  Or where did you first hear that smoking causes lung cancer?  You’ve probably heard it plenty of times from lots of reputable sources but can you name one of those sources with surety?  Unless you’ve read something in the last few days your mind has probably long stripped away any memory of where you got that information or the context you heard it in, and now just stores it in the part of the brain where it stores “facts”.

The interesting thing is that your brain, in transfering this memory to its “fact bin” often strips out very important context, including whether or not that particular item is true or false, or whether it comes from a reliable or unreliable source.  I’ve long-since learned that its very difficult to memorize negative associations like “T-cells are NOT part of the innate immune system” because when test time comes, more often than not I’m only able to remember that T-cells and the innate immune system were somehow related in my studying and I’m not able to tell whether or not T-cells were or were not part of this system, which is usually the fact I actually need to know.  So I’ve stuck to memorizing only positive associations “T-cells ARE part of the adaptive immune system” because then when I remember there’s an association I can be confident its a positive one.

Well political pundits and partisan news organizations are aware of this little brain snafu and take advantage of it on a regular basis.  News headlines are particularly problematic.  Because of source amnesia the following three headlines:

Obama is a Muslim

Obama is not a Muslim

Is Obama a Muslim?

…are pretty much all stored in our brains in the same exact way.  Just a sourceless association between Obama and Muslims.  And because the source and context of these little factoids are stripped away more severely the more often we hear an association the proportion of people who believe (in this example) that Barack Obama is a Muslim has less to do with the content of any of the articles discussing the matter and more to do with the volume of articles that mention his name and Muslims in close proximity to each-other.

The New Yorker ran a controversial cover at the beginning of last July featuring Barack Obama and his wife dressed as militant Muslims which was supposed to be satirical.  It sparked a new interest into the subject of Obama’s faith and several news agencies ran articles looking into the Muslim connection, each one, of course, finding the idea that Obama was a Muslim to be rubbish.  And yet over the course of that month the percent of Americans who believed he was a Muslim had actually risen to 12%! Up from 10% previously. As it turns out remembering that “Obama is NOT a muslim” is about as difficult as remembering that “T-cells are NOT part of the innate immune system.”  After a while all you have left is the association which only gets reinforced the more often its brought up.

The picture I started this article with is another good example.  Hillary Clinton’s camp released it during the primary knowing full well that it doesn’t matter whether this picture is run with an article supporting (where there even any of these?) or debunking the idea that Obama is a Muslim.  And it doesn’t matter whether it’s seen in the National Enquirer or the LA Times.  The source and context will be forgotten and all that will be remembered is the image of Obama in Muslim dress.  And the more often that picture is shown the more people will associate Obama and Muslims in their minds.

Those who listen to talk radio or frequently watch cable news editorial shows can probably easily identify those times when these pundits are consciously using this technique.  They tend to use certain phrases frequently, associating their enemies with all things bad.  Over time, if you are a frequent listener/viewer these associations are pounded so far into your head that they become firmly rooted in the “fact” area of your brain and you completely forget that the only place you’ve heard them is from an uneducated, partisan, clearly-biased entertainer.  In fact a study on source amnesia at Stanford which was cited in this NYT op-ed, found that the more often someone hears a statement, the more likely they are to attribute that statement to a reputable source:

In one study, a group of Stanford students was exposed repeatedly to an unsubstantiated claim taken from a Web site that Coca-Cola is an effective paint thinner. Students who read the statement five times were nearly one-third more likely than those who read it only twice to attribute it to Consumer Reports (rather than The National Enquirer, their other choice), giving it a gloss of credibility.

Thus to our brains repetition=credibility.  And when we’ve heard/read/thought about something enough, we often believe we got it from a credible source, even if we never did.  This is another one of those quick and dirty shortcuts our brains use that are correct more often than not.  I mean generally speaking, the more often you hear something, the more correct it is, especially if you hear it from multiple unrelated sources.  But obviously repetition from a source with little or no credibility, or repetition over and over from the same source doesn’t make a statement any more true.  And our brain really doesn’t take those things into account.

So what does that mean?  Political pundits who frequently use repetitive statements or slogans, or who spend an inordinate amount of time discussing false accusations against their political enemies are literally trying to brainwash you.  And news organizations who frequently use headlines consisting of a controversial statement in the form of a question (Is Barack Obama a communist?  Is John McCain too old to be President?) or who, once again, spend large amounts of time dwelling on false accusations before finally debunking them at the very end of the article are stoking your fear and anger, and in the end, misinforming you for all practical purposes.

I don’t think merely knowing about source amnesia allows you to prevent it in any way.  But knowing how its abused can help you identify those that are taking advantage of it, and avoid them.  Knowing about source amnesia can also encourage us to question those “facts” that we believe we know.  Which doesn’t mean we should just throw up our hands in frustration, but maybe it will help us approach our political discussions with a little more humility. Because even those things that we think are common knowledge, or which we vaguely remember learning from credible sources, may very well be false.

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Okay well I know the stimulus bill is passed and settled now so this will likely be my last post on the subject.  But I’ve had several questions recently about whether or not there’s any truth to accusations of pork in the stimulus and while I’ve mentioned some stimulus myths in a previous post (see “ACORN, Fieldmice, Banning Prayer, Socialized Medicine and other Stimulus Fear-Mongering“) and I’ve talked a little bit about pork in some of my previous posts, I haven’t yet focused on it specifically.  So with this post I intend to answer this question to the best of my ability: “Does the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (aka. The Stimulus Bill) contain pork-barrel spending?”

To address this question we’ll first have to decide on a definition for “Pork-Barrel Spending”.  A pretty representative definition can be found at TheFreeDictionary.com:

“A government project or appropriation that yields jobs or other benefits to a specific locale and patronage opportunities to its political representative.”

While the various definitions I’ve found do vary slightly they all seem to agree on the common theme that pork-barrel spending (which is synonymous with “earmarks” according to most sources) is a “pet project” inserted by a legislator primarily for the benefit of that lawmaker’s constituents.  Some examples of “Pork-Barrel Spending” taken from the website of the organization Citizens Against Government Waste include:

• $375,000,000 for an unrequested and unneeded amphibious assault ship in the state of Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.);

• $700,000 for the Admiral Theater in Bremerton, Washington, the district of House appropriator Norm Dicks (D-Wash.), despite a $4.2 million privately-funded facelift; and

• $500,000 for the Olympic Tree Program in the state of Senate appropriator Robert Bennett for the 2002 Winter Olympics.

So now that we’ve established what an earmark is, are they in the stimulus bill?  The short answer, as far as I can tell, is “not really”.  By the standard definition of earmarks, the definition listed above, the definition that has always been used to refer to earmarks in the past, I haven’t been able to find any evidence of any earmarks/pork-barrel spending items in the bill.  I’ve read the bill, and you can feel free to read it yourself (“Read The Stimulus For Yourself“).  The money is doled out very generally to various government departments.  Money intended for private industry is never allotted to particular companies or projects, and those specific projects that are mentioned are solely those run by the federal government, designed to benefit the government itself or the nation as a whole and can not accurately be called “earmarks”.  There are a couple items that could be classified as earmarks using a loose definition of the term and I’ll discuss those at the end of this article.

So what of all the angry rumors of money going to specific dog-parks, butterfly preserves, fieldmice in SF, golf carts, volcano monitoring, and on and on and on.  Some legislators claim that there are billions of dollars of pork-barrel spending in the bill.  Well most of those allegations are based on the same line of reasoning, which I think most readers will find to be pretty tenuously constructed.  We’ll review one of the most outlandish and oft-repeated claims, that there is “8 billion on the stimulus for a levitating train to DisneyLand”, as an example.

So the story of the Levitating train to Disneyland has been told by Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck, and made its way up to John Boehner, John McCain and Mitch McConnel, before finally being included in Bobby Jindal’s official Republican response to President Obama’s speech to the joint sessions of congress.  This money was supposedly inserted into the stimulus by Harry Reid, or so the story goes, to build a “levitating train” connecting Las Vegas and Disneyland.  Certainly this has to be an outrageous example of government waste gone wild!

Well the truth behind this claim is that Harry Reid, Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Republican Gov of Nevada Jim Gibbons, have been in talks for some time about building a high speed train to connect Las Vegas and LA.  In fact environmental research was performed last summer to those ends.  And “levitating trains” are in the works.  They’re more commonly called “Maglev trains” and they’re used all over the world because their use of magnets reduces friction allowing for higher speeds, increased safety, and greater energy efficiency.  So the Maglev train to LA became the “levitating train to Disneyland” and I can only assume that choice was made because that phrasing elicits a greater visceral reaction.  Now the rumor about this project being included in the stimulus arose because when the stimulus bill was transfered over from the house to the senate, the amount of transportation department money designated to go to high speed rail projects was increased from 2 billion (i believe) to 8 billion.  Since Harry Reid is in the senate, and he has apparently always wanted a bullet train connecting LV and LA, stimulus opponents jumped on the opportunity to portray this bump in funding as an example of wasteful pork-barrel spending.

Early on this claim may have been somewhat excusable, since Reid’s train may have been eligible for at least some of the money if the Department of Transportation had chosen to fund it.  While still not an “earmark” by the normal definition it, theoretically, could have been some underhanded attempt at an earmark if Reid has some kind of prior, secret, massively illegal agreement with the head of the transportation department.  Not a very likely conspiracy since the Transportation secretary is Republican Ray LaHood, but it was at least theoretically possible.  But after a few weeks the department of Transportation released their map of planned high-speed rail corridors.  And it looks like this: Designated High Speed Rail Corridors.   You’ll notice there isn’t a Las Vegas Train on the list.  And yet myths about this flying, disneyland-bound train persist even to this day and are repeated even by highly regarded stimulus opponents.

So we see that even in this example, there is no money designated for any specific train to anywhere.  There is money (8 billion) in the stimulus bill for high speed rail generally, with the decision of which trains should be funded left up to the transportation secretary.  Nearly all claims of stimulus pork are projects that stimulus opponents believe these departments may use their money on, but it has become common practice to say, “there is money in the stimulus for _____”  when in reality there is money in the stimulus for a particular department and stimulus opponents fear that money may be used for _______.   Remember the definition of Pork-Barrel spending is funding inserted into a bill for a particular “pet project” designed to benefit his/her constituents.  If items that a bill’s funds could possibly be used for in the future count as “pork” or “earmarks” then it is a drastic redefinition of the term, and its a definition that could be used to label any spending someone finds even potentially objectionable as “pork”.

The second way pork-claims are justified is very similar.  The US Conference of Mayors issued a report on Jan 17th listing all of the “shovel-ready” projects they had in their cities that could benefit from stimulus money.  You can see these lists, broken down by state and city at StimulusWatch.org.  Of course none of these projects are included specifically in the stimulus bill.  But money is being sent to states to use how they see fit, some of which will trickle down to various cities and will likely be used to fund some of these projects.  So stimulus opponents combed through this list, selected the most ridiculous sounding items, and then paraded them around as pork-barrel spending.  Statements such as this one from Erik Paulson of Minnosota…

“the [stimulus] bill contains a huge amount of spending on many things that are unrelated to saving or creating jobs… It will fund requests such as $2 million for neon signs in Las Vegas, $4.5 million for an eco park featuring butterfly gardens and gopher tortoises, $500,000 for a dog park, $3 million for a municipal golf course clubhouse, $886,000 for a 36-hole disc golf course, $1.8 million for replacement tennis courts, $6 million for three aquatic centers with water slides … the list goes on and on.”

…are simply lists of items from this report from the US Conference of Mayors.  In reality each of these projects would have to compete for stimulus funding and individual states would decide if they get the money.  Obviously the vast, vast majority of projects on these lists will not end up being funded at all, and we have no way of knowing right now which ones will and which ones wont.  And some of the projects on this particular list aren’t even eligible for funding since the Stimulus Bill stipulates that:

“ARRA: Sec. 1604: None of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available in this Act may be used by any State or local government, or any private entity, for any casino or other gambling establishment, aquarium, zoo, golf course, or swimming pool. “

The claims of 3,000 or more pork-barrel spending items in the stimulus bill are arrived at by counting all of the shovel-ready projects listed by US mayors, governors, and government agencies.  Once again, this is a very new definition of “pork-barrel spending” and I think most people will agree its not very accurate, and could even be called purposefully sensationalized and distorted.

Now as I said above, the answer to whether or not the stimulus bill contains earmarks is probably more properly given “not really” than a straight “no”.  Because while 99% of “pork-barrel” claims are accounted for by one of the two methods described above, and its true that there aren’t any elements of the bill that fit the strict historical definition of pork, there are a few items that would probably be considered “earmarks” by a reasonable person.

Specifically, there’s several million dollars for philipino veterans of WWII from US owned islands who never previously received normal veteran benefits.  There’s also a provision in the bill calling for $2 billion for a “near zero emissions powerplant.” Which many suspect is intended to restart FutureGen, a near-zero emissions coal power plant in Illinois.  There’s also $70 million for “supercomputer activities, especially as they relate to climate research.” The Senate Conservatives Fund, a political action committee, says that is probably targeted for the National Center for Environmental Prediction in Camp Springs, Md.  The group also cites $250 million that is designated “to repair NASA facilities damaged by Hurricane Ike and to reduce the significant backlog of maintenance and repair projects at NASA facilities nationwide.” That appears to be for the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Those were the only items in the stimulus I could find that could reasonable be construed as earmarks.  Though even these items are not earmarks in the strict sense since they were not planted by any particular legislators and they aren’t really clearly benefitting the constituents of any particular legislator.  But they could be considered earmarks because they contain cash that is specifically set apart for certain companies or projects.  Or at least they appear to be even if not explicitly designated as such.

So that’s it.  Not nearly as exciting or scandalous as its made out to be.  There are a few spending items that could be loosely defined as earmarks, so the administration’s claims that the bill is “earmark free” may be technically accurate though a little bit of a stretch.  But none of the projects often cited by stimulus opponents are mentioned specifically in the stimulus bill and most claims of “pork-barrel spending” are really hard to see as anything other than a misrepresentation, when investigated more thoroughly.

On a personal note I think the lack of significant earmarks in the stimulus bill is a laudable accomplishment.  Completely earmark-free or not its certainly a huge improvement over what we’ve done in the past.  The new “omnibus” spending bill, on the other hand, which is currently making its way through the legislature is unfortunately laden with thousands upon thousands of earmarks.  Most of those were established before the current administration took office but Obama hasn’t specifically spoken out against the pork-filled bill yet.  It remains to be seen whether the relative cleanliness of the stimulus bill signals a new direction for our government or just a momentary reprieve from pork-barrel spending.  Time will tell.

For more interesting stimulus fact-checking be sure to check out Politifact.com and Factcheck.Org both of which were used in researching this article.  They are the two most unbiased, non-partisan political fact-checking groups I’ve come across, and they’re very thorough.  I recommend checking their websites on a regular basis.

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