Kerry's Misery Index

Master Sergeant Eaton was far and away the best mathematician I ever knew. Mind you, I didn't know many, and I have no Idea if he knew what the Reinman Hypothesis was, but when I got lost trying to help a guy out with advanced math, he stepped in and slugged it out successfully.

MSG Eaton had a saying "Figures never lie, but Liars always figure."

As tempting as it my be to call Senator Kerry's "Middle Class Misery Index" a pile of nonsense, it is charitably the result of the economic ignorance endemic to most of America.

The misery index that Ronald Reagan (blessings on his name) used to bludgeon Jimmy Carter with was a simple combination of unemployment with inflation. Do you have a job, and how much is your paycheck worth. This has been in use for decades, and it is useful mostly as a political stick to beat incumbents with. That being the case, George Bush's below average misery index doesn't serve the Kerry Campaign.

Scientists and statisticians don't just change their data sets when they don't like the results, but then John Kerry is neither a scientist nor a statistician. Kerry's index conflates average family income, individual bankruptcies, non-government job growth, how many people own homes, and college, gasoline and health care expenses.

About the only thing we need to know about this index is that it shows that the Carter years (M.I. of 21) were better for America than the Bush years (M.I. 7.6). That said, I think the indicators included in the index deserve comment. Two that I have already done a little research on are college tuition and health care costs.

These have been rising faster than the inflation rate for years, long before Bush took office. Moreover, the issues behind health care costs and tuition increases are outside the scope of the President's control, and it could be argued that government intervention is a root cause of their rapid increase.

Is John Kerry going to just tell colleges to stop raising rates? Of course not, his Solicitor General will have lawsuits challenging that law on his desk before Kerry's signature is dry. Is he going to just write checks for tuition out of the public treasury? That doesn't reduce costs, it just shifts them from the person receiving the benefit to the public at large. Cheese costs $3.00 and more a pound because the government buys up a whole bunch of it and passes it out for free. Sure, farmers benefits, and poor people benefit, but it sure as hell doesn't reduce prices. All this applies to health care, too plus a whole bunch of other factors (few dairy farmers have been sued over cheese malpractice) that increase costs.

I'd like to know if John Kerry can find reputable economists who are willing to submit his newfangled index to a peer reviewed journal. Unless he can and until he does, it deserves little more attention than any other half-baked election year balderdash.

Tim McNabb