Misinformation mostly confuses your own side

Propaganda is overrated

Donald Trump says lots of things that aren’t true, and if you’re a reader of this newsletter, it is extremely unlikely that he’s ever persuaded you with any of his lies.

In part, that’s because Slow Boring readers are discerning, intelligent people who are harder to dupe than the average human being. But it’s also because we all, no matter how open-minded, process new information through the lens of what we already believe.

I have no idea what the 8,000 or so employees of the US Fish and Wildlife Service do. But if Elon Musk tweets tomorrow that he has uncovered vast quantities of fraudulent spending in the USFWS, my assumption will be that he’s full of shit. Not because I have any strong views about the agency, but because I have a well-founded view that Musk tweets a lot of nonsense and, more specifically, has a habit of wildly overstating and mischaracterizing facts about federal spending.

By contrast, if Barack Obama says tomorrow that there’s a ton of waste in the USFWS that he was never able to tackle due to the political clout of Big Fish, my assumption will be that there’s something fishy with this agency.

Of course, a reasonable person — especially someone like me whose job depends on it — does try to do some due diligence and independent thinking. Trump once said something fairly garbled about the need to rake forests to avert wildfires, which generated a lot of knee-jerk progressive derision. But it is, in fact, true that “mechanical fuel reduction” (which could include raking) is an effective wildfire mitigation strategy, and if you think about something like the recent LA wildfires, it’s not really plausible that you would do a lot of controlled burning so close to densely built suburbs. In other words, the heuristic “don’t believe a liar” can fail you. But it’s pretty good! You’re much more likely to be taken in by something untrue or misleading said by somebody that you trust than by an opponent.

This is all kind of obvious, but I think it’s underrated in discussions of political misinformation and investments in media and advocacy organizations.

It’s pretty easy to persuade a large minority of the public of something, but the people you persuade are almost certainly going to be people who would vote for you anyway. Convincing high-value persuasion targets is a lot harder. And there can be huge second-order downsides to convincing your supporters of things that are not actually true. It may feel savvy to support sloppy, misleading, or inaccurate work from your own side, but it’s often counterproductive.

GOP fiscal miasma

Whatever motivations or goals underlie DOGE, I think we can assume most of them come down to Donald Trump’s affection for anything that maximizes his personal power and sense of control. Of course, some on the right view the civil service as not only having, in the aggregate, left-of-center political opinions, but as constituting a critical left-wing institutional pillar, such that a mass layoff of USFWS employees would crush the left.

I am pretty skeptical of that theory, but it hasn’t been empirically tested, so it at least might be true.

What is definitely not true is that cutting federal civilian personnel costs will meaningfully alter the trajectory of the federal fiscal situation. Total personnel spending is about 0.2 percent of GDP, while the budget deficit is about 6.3 percent of GDP and rising due to population aging. Obviously, on some level, every little bit helps, and there’s no excuse for genuinely wasteful spending. But it’s just not true that you can cut taxes, maintain benefits for the elderly, and reduce the budget deficit by firing bureaucrats. And it’s especially not true that you can do that without visibly degrading the quality of public services.

I recently spoke to a smart, DOGE-skeptical center-right fiscal policy professional, and he assured me that there are normal conservative budget analysts working in the Trump administration who are aware of this. Their pitch to him was that Republicans have tried charging at retirement programs in the past, only to suffer massive political defeat. My interpretation of that cycle of events is that Republicans should be more open to bipartisan proposals that would feature revenue-increasing tax reform. But their interpretation is that Republicans need to really go to town on “waste” to earn credibility.

I don’t think that makes a ton of sense. Regardless, though, it doesn’t match what’s actually happening with DOGE, which is that Musk is promising people their benefits will go up even as Republicans enact multi-trillion dollar tax cuts.

To the extent that Musk can convince swing voters that this is true, he has a winning piece of political rhetoric. But it’s not true. And Musk is much more likely to persuade hard-core Republicans that this is true than he is to persuade swing voters, even though there’s no electoral value to persuading hard-core Republicans of false things about fiscal policy! Most of what he’s accomplishing here is making it tactically and strategically harder for Republicans to advance conservative fiscal policy arguments by undermining conservative budget experts in the eyes of the conservative base.

The levelized cost of energy

A progressive version of this emerged about five years ago, when arguments started popping up that wind and solar power had become cheaper sources of electricity than fossil fuels. This is based on a concept called the Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) that, unfortunately, paints a misleading view of the situation.

What is true is that solar panels have become very cheap to manufacture, such that a well-located utility-scale solar plant is cheaper to build than a fossil fuel plant that generates the same amount of electricity over the course of a year. This is a true fact with some genuine economic significance, and it explains why a country like China that doesn’t appear to care much about climate change is building a lot of renewable energy infrastructure.

But the inference progressives wanted to draw from this LCOE framework — that there were no economic downsides to trying to strangle fossil fuel extraction — is totally wrong. The issue is that solar intermittency, which is easy to ignore when you’re not using that much solar power, becomes a bigger and bigger deal the more solar grows as a share of the total electricity mix. You start needing to overbuild, to add expensive storage features, or to maintain purpose-built natural gas backups. This doesn’t mean solar is useless (it’s very useful) or that the problems are unsolvable. But the problems do exist.

Spinning about this didn’t do much to persuade swing voters, but it did confuse a lot of Democrats into signing up for 100 percent renewable energy pledges that they mistakenly thought would be cheap and easy to fulfill. In the end, the Biden administration pursued a pretty sensible and balanced course on energy. But they did come out swinging after inauguration with ideas, like banning all new public lands oil and gas leasing, that would have been harmful if implemented. And when they ended up not doing anything close to that, they faced backlash for betraying climate pledges that never made sense to make.

Good decisions require good information

At some point during the 2024 campaign, you probably heard that overall post-Covid inflation was about the same in the United States and Europe.

As far as partisan talking points go, this one has the virtue of being true. That said, Democrats’ goal in making this observation was to convince people that the Biden administration’s policy choices had nothing to do with the inflation that people experienced. This, unfortunately, is doubly wrong. For starters, the initial inflationary impulse largely came from flush consumers buying durable goods faster than they could be produced or shipped. The US market is so large that American consumers are able to move the price of globally shipped manufactured items, which pushed up prices in Portugal and Denmark, just as it did here.

But the bigger issue is energy.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine increased the price of oil and natural gas around the world. The United States, however, produces a lot of oil and gas. So while the spike in oil prices hurt consumers everywhere, in Europe it pushed the exchange rate down (because they import so much oil), which hurt Europeans’ ability to buy basically everything. In America, the impact was more balanced. On gas, things diverged even more. Trading natural gas requires extensive physical infrastructure. When Russian gas flows to Europe were curtailed, that spiked prices in Europe where the pipelines go. America’s natural gas infrastructure is physically disconnected from the Eurasian pipeline network, so the price impact here was muted. It is possible to put liquified natural gas on boats and ship it to Europe, which happened as a result of the war, but capacity constraints prevent the prices from equalizing.

The upshot is that while it’s factually accurate to say that inflation was similar on both sides of the Atlantic, this is partly a coincidence. Supply-side and demand-side factors played a role in both places, but Europe had a bigger negative supply shock and we had a larger demand overshoot.

You can’t blame anyone for trying to run a winning campaign. But this kind of rhetoric was more effective at exonerating Biden-era policymaking in the eyes of Democratic Party operatives and politicians than in the eyes of the voters. Which is a problem if you want those operatives and politicians to learn from errors and make better decisions in the future.

Similarly, conservatives spent a lot of time during the Biden years posting charts showing that net job growth was all due to immigration in an effort to imply that native-born Americans were being disemployed in large numbers by Biden’s border policies.

The actual situation is that the working-age population is shrinking, so either net employment is driven by immigrants (because native-born Americans are retiring faster than they age into the workforce) or else the labor force is shrinking.

That analysis does not, in and of itself, prescribe any particular immigration policy, nor does it excuse some of the Biden administration’s mistakes. But it does mean that the actual tradeoffs facing the Trump administration as it seeks to step up the pace of deportations are different and tougher than true believers in this rhetoric would like.

If you take the misleading tweets seriously, deportations will boost the economic fortunes of American citizens. The fact that this is not actually true is something that Republicans should think about, but don’t seem to be.

An earnest plea for more honesty

My bottom line on this is that saying things that are true is underrated and saying things that are false is overrated.

We’re all acutely aware of the false or misleading things our political opponents say, and it’s easy to convince yourself in the spirit of “turnabout is fair play” that the key to victory is to play dirty, too. The real problem, though, is that not only does your side already say more false and misleading things than you’d like to admit, but they are almost certainly saying more false and misleading things than you realize. That’s because your side is much better at misleading you than they are at misleading people outside of your ideological camp, and this kind of own-team deception creates huge tactical and strategic problems.

To return to DOGE, I keep hearing from rightists online that we need to try Trump’s disruptive approach because no other route to curbing spending has ever worked.

This is just not true.

The main reason spending never fell during Trump’s prior term is that Trump never made an effort to prioritize spending cuts in an appropriations negotiation. When Obama was president, congressional Republicans did push hard for cuts and as a result, spending fell. In response to GOP efforts, Obama tried to sell them on prioritizing long-term deficit reduction — even larger spending cuts paired with revenue-raising tax reform — and they said no. But back when Bill Clinton was president, Democrats passed balanced deficit reduction on a party line vote in 1993. And during George H.W. Bush’s presidency, a bipartisan balanced deficit reduction package passed.

It’s definitely true that most of these things happened before online rightists were paying attention to politics, possibly before many of them were alive. But that just goes to show how useful it is to learn true facts about the world rather than spend your life swimming in misinformation. I’m sure some of the people behind this drive are operating in bad faith and pursuing objectives other than the stated fiscal goals. But whenever you get large numbers of people saying things that aren’t true, they end up convincing lots of other people — mostly on their side — and those people start making bad decisions based on faulty information.

It’s genuinely much better for elected officials, donors, and activists to try to prioritize disseminating accurate information rather than trying to snow the public with propaganda — both because honesty is a virtue, and because the instrumental value of propaganda is really easy to overestimate.