Show me the money?

March 22, 2004 5:25 PM

How We Got Homeland Security Wrong -- If all the federal homeland-security grants from last year are added together, Wyoming received $61 a person while California got just $14, according to data gathered at TIME's request by the Public Policy Institute of California, an independent, nonprofit research organization. Alaska received an impressive $58 a resident, while New York got less than $25. On and on goes the upside-down math of the new homeland-security funding. The TIME article uses AIR Worldwide Corp.'s Terrorism Loss Estimation Model.
posted by amberglow (20 comments total)

This whole article is like a lesson in how to lie with statistics. Certainly it points out some basic inequities in the distribution model, but it conveniently omits pointing out that at $14 per capita versus Wyoming's $61, California still got a whole shitload more money than Wyoming in total. The overall point of the article may be correct, but the fact that they conveniently chose the view of the numbers that can't help but be the most supportive of the position taken makes me incredibly suspicious of the article as a whole.
posted by jacquilynne at 5:50 PM on March 22, 2004

I'm as anti-Bush as they come, but using this as an attack point is ridiculous. As jacquilynne notes, the total money going to CA and NY far outstrips the money going to sparsely populated WY and AK. We don't know what's being protected in states like WY, AK and ND, but aren't there are lot of crazy military installations in those states? And aren't city and state governments in CA and NY more likely to already have anti-terror programs and safeguards in place than are WY and AK?
posted by aaronetc at 5:57 PM on March 22, 2004

At the end of the day, blowing off New York and L.A. so that you can make sure Wyoming is safe just makes no sense.

"At the end of the day" - blowing off the fact that no one has been able to pull off a successful terrorist attack in the US since 9/11 ... would appear to make arguments about how "wrong" we've gotten homeland security sort of make, um, no sense.

There most certainly are critics of how homeland security is being done. On all sides ... people who like Bush, and those who hate him. And a whole host of others that have opinions, based on a variety of perspectives or professions, that will argue that this emphasis or that is correct or incorrect. And try to use all manner of evidence to back their cases. (Though in this particular case, as jacquilynne pointed out, the evidence is highly questionable ... per capita spending on a state by state basis is one of the single stupidest ways of measuring the rationality of distribution there is ... ). It is a good thing to have these public debates - and they will continue no matter who is in power.

However, this is not an academic question - ultimately it reduces to life and death. There can be only two reasons why no further terrorist acts have occured here ... either the terrorists have stopped trying (a fairly ridiculous thought), or the current efforts to stop them have, to date, worked.

It might be argued that the efforts to date are not as cost-effective as they can be. Which is probably a legitimate argument. After 9/11, the national reaction was to throw everything necessary at the problem. Many efforts, over time, will prove to be more or less useful than others. We will get better, and more focused at the process. But there's a difference between not achieving complete efficiencies at providing security, and getting Homeland Security wrong.

You can argue that we're spending too much. Or have had to sacrifice too much privacy. Or any one of a dozen different things ... but you cannot argue that what has been done to date has not worked.
posted by MidasMulligan at 6:33 PM on March 22, 2004

Red states, more money per person. Blue states, less money per person. Makes perfect sense to me.
posted by benjh at 7:25 PM on March 22, 2004

"At the end of the day" - blowing off the fact that no one has been able to pull off a successful terrorist attack in the US since 9/11 ... would appear to make arguments about how "wrong" we've gotten homeland security sort of make, um, no sense.

You're repeating yourself, I've seen you post this line of reasoning before without realizing that your use of the words 'been able to' is either clumsy or deliberately misleading. Point us to a foiled attempt at a large-scale attack, please. Keeping in mind that while George Bush storms ahead with his faith-based missile defense program (to steal a phrase) the country's ports are still wide open to someone sailing a ship loaded with explosives right into the heart of a major city.
posted by Space Coyote at 7:48 PM on March 22, 2004

There can be only two reasons why no further terrorist acts have occured here ... either the terrorists have stopped trying (a fairly ridiculous thought), or the current efforts to stop them have, to date, worked.

Yeah, and up until September 10th, our precautions worked perfectly.

I think it's way more likely that the difficulty of pulling off a major terrorist act in the US is as high as it ever was, and that Al Qaeda can get more bang for its buck by hitting easier targets.
posted by bshort at 7:50 PM on March 22, 2004

Yeah, and up until September 10th, our precautions worked perfectly.

Actually, they didn't. Clinton was didn't do much after the first WTC bombing. But at least he kept us safe from small Cuban boys.
posted by MidasMulligan at 8:54 PM on March 22, 2004

Clinton was didn't do much after the first WTC bombing.

Yeah, but Clinton was did awesome job between first WTC bombing and the end of his second term! No terrorist attacks on US soil. Way to go Clinton!
posted by crazy finger at 9:29 PM on March 22, 2004

"At the end of the day" - blowing off the fact that no one has been able to pull off a successful terrorist attack in the US since 9/11 ... would appear to make arguments about how "wrong" we've gotten homeland security sort of make, um, no sense.

Homer: Not a bear in sight. The Bear Patrol must be working like a charm.
Lisa: That's specious reasoning, Dad.
Homer: Thank you, dear.
Lisa: By your logic I could claim that this rock keeps tigers away.
Homer: Oh, how does it work?
Lisa: It doesn't work.
Homer: Uh-huh.
Lisa: It's just a stupid rock.
Homer: Uh-huh.
Lisa: But I don't see any tigers around, do you?
[Homer thinks of this, then pulls out some money]
Homer: Lisa, I want to buy your rock.
posted by aubin at 9:30 PM on March 22, 2004

Stahl (exp): {By June, 2001, there still hadn't been a cabinet-level meeting on terrorism, even though the US intelligence community was picking up an unprecedented level of ominous chatter. The CIA Director warned the White House.}

Clarke: George Tenet was saying to the White House, saying to the President cause he briefed him every morning, a major al Qaeda attack is going to happen against the United States, somewhere in the world in the weeks and months ahead. He said that in June, July, August.

Stahl (exp): {The last time the CIA had picked up a similar level of intelligence chatter was back in December 1999 when Clarke was the Terrorism Czar in the Clinton White House. Clarke says that President Clinton ordered his cabinet to go to battle stations, meaning they were on high alert, holding meetings nearly every day. That, Clarke says, helped thwart a major attack on Los Angeles Int'l airport when this al Qaeda operative was stopped at the border with Canada driving a car full of explosives. Clarke harshly criticizes President Bush for not going to battle stations when the CIA warned him of a comparable threat in the months before 9/11.}

Clarke: He never thought it was important enough for *him* [Clarke's emphasis] to hold a meeting on the subject, or for him to order his National Security Advisor to hold a cabinet-level meeting on the subject.

Stahl: Why would having a meeting make a difference?

Clarke: If you compare December 1999 to June and July of 2001, in December '99, every day or every other day, the head of the FBI, the head of the CIA, the Attorney General had to go to the White House and sit in a meeting and report on all the things that they personally had done to stop the al Qaeda attack, so they were going back every night to their departments and shaking the trees personally and finding out all the information. If that had happened in July of 2001, we might have found out in the White House, the Attorney General might have found out that there were al Qaeda operatives in the United States. FBI, at lower levels, knew -- never told me, never told the highest levels in the FBI.

Stahl (exp): {The FBI and the CIA knew that these two al Qaeda operatives [pictures displayed onscreen] both among the 9/11 hijackers, had been living in the United States since 2000, yet neither agency passed that information up the chain of command or told Dick Clarke, the White House Terrorism Coordinator.}

Clarke: And here I am in the White House saying, something's about to happen. Tell me -- if a sparrow falls from the tree, I want to know, if anything unusual's going on, because we're about to be hit.

Stahl: No one told you. No one told you.

Clarke: Leslie, if we had put their picture on the CBS Evening News, if we had put their picture on Dan Rather, on USA Today, we could have caught those guys and then we might have been able to pull that thread and get more of the conspiracy. I'm not saying we could have stopped 9/11, but we could have at least had a chance.

Stahl (exp): {But as we all know, the al Qaeda sleeper cell was left free to plan the 9/11 attack while Dick Clarke kept agitating for the high-level White House meeting he had been seeking.}

Stahl: You finally did get your cabinet-level meeting. Finally. When did that meeting take place?

Clarke: The cabinet meeting I asked for right after the inauguration took place one week prior to 9/11.

60 Minutes Transcript
posted by y2karl at 9:40 PM on March 22, 2004

In the early days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the Bush White House cut by nearly two-thirds an emergency request for counterterrorism funds by the FBI, an internal administration budget document shows.

The document, dated Oct. 12, 2001, shows that the FBI requested $1.5 billion in additional funds to enhance its counterterrorism efforts with the creation of 2,024 positions. But the White House Office of Management and Budget cut that request to $531 million. Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, working within the White House limits, cut the FBI's request for items such as computer networking and foreign language intercepts by half, cut a cyber-security request by three quarters and eliminated entirely a request for "collaborative capabilities."



( [e-mail] / fast , [e-mail] / asmic , [e-mail] / cpunks , [e-mail] / woman or [e-mail] / asmic - try those for WaPo user/passwords for graphic )

The document showing the FBI request after the Sept. 11 attacks was part of the OMB "passback" process, in which the budget office reviews and pares agency requests. Though it is typical for the White House to reduce agency requests, Bush's foes think the sharp reduction in the FBI's counterterrorism request could be politically damaging for the president.

"Despite multiple terror warnings before and after 9/11, [Bush] repeatedly rejected counterterrorism resources that his own security agencies said was desperately needed to protect America," said David Sirota, spokesman for Podesta's group, which plans to post the documents on its Web site today.

In a further blow to the Bush camp a former counterterrorism coordinator said that national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, "looked skeptical" when she was warned early in 2001 about the threat from al-Qaida and appeared never to have heard of the organization.

"Her facial expression gave me the impression that she had never heard the term before," wrote Richard A. Clarke in a new book, "Against All Enemies," that is scathingly critical of Bush's response to the 2001 terror attacks

Rice will not testify before 9/11 panel

9/11: Internal Government Documents Show How the Bush Administration Reduced Counterterrorism
posted by y2karl at 10:31 PM on March 22, 2004

I don't know about this "we" that got the security wrong.

I had a great plan! But of course my plan involved restoring democracy to the US first, reducing dependence on foreign oil second, and establishing transport security third.

None of these things interested aWol in the least since funnelling dollars to his corporate cronies and attacking Iraq were the only things on his little pea brain dictatorial mind.

How we long for the days when the only bad thing happening in the world was someone getting a hummer from a fat little gold digging whore.
posted by nofundy at 4:55 AM on March 23, 2004

Well I'm no fan of Dubya, but I agree this article uses statistics in what can be seen as a misleading way - throwing suspect on their whole thesis (even though it does seem to be somewhat sound in other ways.)

Aren't Alaska and Wyoming two of the states with the largest amounts of Federal land? And as someone noted, there must be some sort of economy-of-scale in densely-populated areas.

On the other hand, the fact that "40% of the funds had to be divided up equally among the states, regardless of size or population" is the type of Federal political cluster fu*k idiocy one sees fr too often in all types of government programs.
posted by sixdifferentways at 11:49 AM on March 23, 2004

I don't see anything patently misleading about the statistics. Every time numbers are used, they are identified clearly as PER CAPITA. Jacquilynne points out that "at $14 per capita versus Wyoming's $61, California still got a whole shitload more money than Wyoming in total" as if the article were ignoring the fact that California, in aggregate, got more than Wyoming.

But the article would be misleading only if it failed to note that the dollar amounts were per capita. Or if the reader doesn't know what per capita means.

This is the point of the article: Because of politics and pride, not enough money for prevention and response is getting to areas that need that money the most: areas with the greatest number of likely targets and with the greatest number of people who would be killed and maimed by a terrorist attack or attacks. Citing per capita funding helps demonstrate this point.
posted by hhc5 at 12:17 PM on March 23, 2004

...either the terrorists have stopped trying (a fairly ridiculous thought)...

Or maybe they blew their wad on that one attack and didn't (and still don't) have the resources, people or smarts to sustain a "terrorist war" against us. The threat of hijackers using commericial airliners as attack missiles was well enough known before 9-11 that it was one of the first things I thought of when I saw the first plane crashed into the first tower; I briefly dismissed the idea just because the plane seemed to have hit too high and too far from a corner to likely topple the tower, but then I saw the second plane hit in the "sweet spot" and I knew for sure. One of the most striking facts I heard about the 'killjackers' was that at least one of the groups on one of the planes had bought one-way tickets as a group on a single credit card, which was supposed to raise a red flag based on PRE-9-11 terrorist precautions. It was SO preventable if only the sitting administration had done ANYTHING after the intelligence community started reporting warnings 2-3 months before. But Clinton, after getting surprised by the attack on the USS Cole in October 2000, put together a fairly comprehensive anti-terrorist plan but didn't impliment it, deciding his work during his lame-duck days were better spent issuing Presidential Pardons. Bush's people took the "if it's Clinton's idea, kill it" approach and we were caught flat-footed and stupid by a small group of self-destructing hijackers who ended up causing a small fraction of the human damage they coud have (which I explained in a previous Terrorism thread). If course, if Bubba HAD started to impliment his plan before leaving office and then Bush stopped it, that would've been the smokin-est gun ever as to W's true mismanagement from Day One, that pro-Bushies, who already defy logic and warp the truth daily to defend his actions and inactions, could never explain away.

But then wheelchair racers don't have a leg to stand on either, and they run the Marathon faster than any two-legged competitor...
posted by wendell at 12:29 PM on March 23, 2004

By the way, here's some required reading on statistical manipulation: "How to Lie With Statistics" a short, humorous, and densely packed compendium of facts-and-figures abuse, that, despite being written 50 years ago, is perfectly valid today (proof that we are NOT getting any smarter). Just ignore the dated quaintness of the original illustrations (so-o-o-o 1950's).

Of course, if you did an honest assessment of any "terrorist threat", it would be obvious that if it did not target a large number of people in a relatively small area, it wouldn't be a "terrorist threat" at all (the "terrorist threat" to infastructure apart from a population center is yet unproven to actually exist... unless you believe that terrorists caused that blackout...). Thus, the residents of New York City are far more likely to be threatened than those of rural Wyoming, but then again, the residents of Wyoming have 40-some times more representation in the Senate than the residents of California, so what are you gonna do? Or maybe that empty field in Pennsylvania was really the 9-11 terrorists' primary target after all!
posted by wendell at 12:46 PM on March 23, 2004

I got an email from a nice lurker:
In the mountain west, our lives have always been subsidized. The government owns over half of the land in Wyoming. But I wouldn't be too hasty to cut terrorism spending here down to the same amount per capita as New York just because there are an awful lot of nuclear bombs between Laramie and Cheyenne and a lot of the country is downwind of the fallout. Ames, Iowa has pathogen labs that would also be a very interesting terrorist target, but Ames isn't very big.
Stupid terrorists. Making us think about equity in spending. And forcing us to figure out how to protect ourselves without being assholes (which our government is failing spectacularly at). Grrr.
posted by amberglow at 4:23 PM on March 23, 2004

I don't see anything patently misleading about the statistics. Every time numbers are used, they are identified clearly as PER CAPITA. Jacquilynne points out that "at $14 per capita versus Wyoming's $61, California still got a whole shitload more money than Wyoming in total" as if the article were ignoring the fact that California, in aggregate, got more than Wyoming.

Yes, that's exactly my point. Thanks for reiterating it. When you continually refer to a single interpretation of the numbers, the one that most dramatically supports your position, and never once refer to another number, and one which is equally valid, far less dramatic, and not really in support of your position, you're manipulating the statistics to suit your purpose.

Back home, we had a newspaper article once, bemoaning the rise in violence in our town and talking about how the murder rate had DOUBLED YEAR OVER YEAR!!!!!! It kept harping again and again on the doubling of the murder rate. And certainly, that was true. In one year, we had 3 murders. In the next year, there were 6. Of course, 4 of the 6 happened when a man went crazy and wiped out his wife and 3 kids. But hey, let's not quibble about the details - DOUBLED!!!!!

Just because your numbers are correct doesn't make them less misleading.
posted by jacquilynne at 7:36 PM on March 23, 2004

Jacquilynne, the newspaper article bemoaning the 100 percent increase in murders is misleading, b/c it disregards the more pertinent fact that there were still merely 6 murders. But what if in your town, there were only 12 residents? Would it be misleading to write that the murder rate was 2 murders per capita?

The whole thrust of the FFP article was that the funding schemes, when considered per capita, make little sense. That's the pertinent fact. So not only does the article clearly indicate the aggregate numbers, those aggregate numbers are less pertinent than the per capita numbers.

Amberglow, the Time article deals with anti-terrorism funds that go to local and state agencies -- local police departments and state emergency management agencies. There may be "an awful lot of nuclear bombs between Laramie and Cheyenne" but the Army and Dept. of Energy have the responsibility to ensure security of these facilities. I don't know of any lack of funding for those outfits (and if there is, that lies outside the purview of the article). The article was about the cops and troopers who protect the country's streets and subways, and how the cities with the most subways to safeguard and most people to rescue aren't getting enough money to do so.
posted by hhc5 at 9:51 PM on March 23, 2004

I know, hhc5--the lurker who emailed me was trying to find some justification for the funding disparities.
posted by amberglow at 6:07 AM on March 24, 2004