GOP seizes on terror issue - and the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy of logic

In the December 28, 2009 Politico article "GOP seizes on terror issue," Glenn Thrush and Martin Kady II explain that Republicans want to make defense against terrorism a political issue. They warn that the attacks may backfire because of the Republicans' own spotty record.

Critics should be especially careful if they want to argue that the Christmas Day security screening failures are the fault of the Obama administration because it was in power when the lapses occurred. By that logic, the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks should be blamed on President George W. Bush and his Republican administration. The point of emphasis is the fallacy of logic known as post hoc ergo propter hoc in which one assumes that because one event precedes another, the first event caused the second one. In this case, the (erroneous) reasoning is that because the Christmas Day attempted bombing occurred after Obama became President, then his ascendency to power must be the cause of the security failure. That is likely to be no more accurate than an assertion that Bush's ascendency in 2001 caused the 9/11 attacks.

Republicans have wasted no time in attacking Democrats on intelligence and screening failures leading up to the failed Christmas Day bombing of Flight 253 — a significant departure from the calibrated, less partisan responses that have followed other recent terrorist activity.

The strategy — coming as the Republican leadership seeks to exploit Democratic weaknesses heading into the 2010 midterms — is in many ways a natural for a party that views protecting the U.S. homeland as its ideological raison d’etre and electoral franchise.

President Obama’s GOP critics have been emboldened during the past 48 hours by the stumbling initial response of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who spent Monday retracting her Sunday claim that “the system worked” in the aftermath of Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab’s near takedown of a jet ferrying nearly 300 people from Amsterdam to Detroit.

“In the past six weeks, you’ve had the Fort Hood attack, the D.C. Five and now the attempted attack on the plane in Detroit … and they all underscored the clear philosophical difference between the administration and us,” said Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.), the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee.

“I think Secretary Napolitano and the rest of the Obama administration view their role as law enforcement, first responders dealing with the aftermath of an attack,” Hoekstra told POLITICO. “And we believe in a forward-looking approach to stopping these attacks before they happen.”

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) went even further, telling FOX News that the Christmas attack proved President Obama’s talk-to-your-enemies approach might actually be encouraging terrorists.

“[S]oft talk about engagement, closing Gitmo, these things are not going to appease the terrorists,” he said. “They’re going to keep coming after us, and we can’t have politics as usual in Washington, and I’m afraid that’s what we’ve got right now with airport security.”

Obama didn’t address his critics during a brief appearance in Hawaii on Monday, saying only that "the American people should be assured that we are doing everything in our power to keep you and your family safe and secure during this busy holiday season. … As Americans, we will never give into fear and division."

A White House spokesman says the administration wants to avoid making the national security and terrorism a partisan issue.

“The president doesn't think we should play politics with issues like these. He hasn't. His response has been fact-based and appropriate and will continue to be as such,” said deputy White House press secretary Bill Burton.

But other Democrats say the GOP’s yuletide political offensive could backfire on Republicans, putting the spotlight on the party’s own less-than-spotless record on homeland security.

Exhibit A: DeMint’s controversial “hold” on Obama’s choice to lead the Transportation Safety Administration, Erroll Southers, which has left the agency leaderless during a critical period of reappraisal and potential reorganization.

“Considering that this group has been playing politics with the TSA for months, their new-found concern about safety seems a bit contrived,” said Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.), who acknowledged “legitimate beefs” about lapses leading up to the Christmas Day bombing attempt.

DeMint says he’s blocking Southers because the top cop at Los Angeles International Airport hasn’t vowed to block TSA unionization. And spokesman Wes Denton said the agency is better off headless than with big labor running the nation’s airports.

“This is an important debate because many Americans don't want someone running the TSA who stands ready to give union bosses the power to veto or delay future security measures at our airports,” Denton said.

DeMint isn’t the only Republican raising concerns that Abdulmuttalab was allowed to board the plane despite being placed on a list of potentially dangerous foreign nationals and that he managed to escape detection despite carrying a large amount of explosive powder sewn into his underwear.

Early Monday morning, the House Republican Conference blasted an e-mail offering up a half-dozen GOP lawmakers to discuss national security — and to criticize the Obama White House.

Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), the top Homeland Security Committee Republican, criticized the Obama administration for not going public more quickly to reassure Americans that the skies are safe.

Hoekstra, for his part, blamed the president for “downplaying” the threat of terrorism and slammed the White House for failing to provide detailed bipartisan briefings.

Democrats, on the other hand, say they have plenty of ammunition for a homeland security counterattack.

Over the summer, 108 House Republicans voted against the final conference report of the 2010 appropriation bill for the Department of Homeland Security, which included funding for explosives detection systems and other aviation security measures.

The no voters cited a procedural dispute over the appropriations process. They included Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio), Hoekstra and a who’s who of big-name House Republicans: Reps. Mike Pence, Michelle Bachmann (R-Minn.), Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Joe Wilson (R-SC).

The conference bill included more than $4 billion for "screening operations," including $1.1 billion in funding for explosives detection systems, with $778 million intended for buying and installing the systems.

“It’s a base political calculation,” said one senior House Democratic aide. “It’s risky to play politics with something like this. The morning after [the attempted bombing], Republicans had already drawn a bright line on this.”

In June, both parties overwhelmingly backed Utah Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz, who inserted an amendment into the House's massive Homeland Security appropriations bill barring the use of full-body image scans as "primary" screening tools at airports.

The amendment, which died in the Senate, passed the House on a bipartisan 310 to 118 vote, with conservative libertarians joining liberals, all decrying the scans as a major invasion of privacy.

It would also have given passengers the option of getting a pat-down — which might have also detected the Christmas bomb — while banning the storage and copying of the images, which show a virtual picture of a person's naked body.

The measure was little-noticed at the time, but it could have a big impact if the Obama administration follows through on its pledge to increase such imaging, which experts say could have detected the explosives hidden on the body of the would-be airplane bomber.
Chaffetz, for his part, doesn’t regret the amendment, telling the Salt Lake Tribune, "It's a difficult balance between protecting our civil liberties and protecting the safety of people on airplanes," adding, “I believe there's technology out there that can identify bomb-type materials without necessarily overly invading our privacy."

In the coming days, GOP criticism of the administration’s actions may give way to a louder, if more decorous din from Democrats questioning security procedures here and abroad.

A handful of key congressional chairmen have already scheduled hearings to see what did go wrong on that Northwestern Airlines flight.

Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), who chairs the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, says his panel will investigate how the attempted bomber slipped through security and screening procedures.

"I view Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab as a terrorist who evaded our homeland security defenses and who would have killed hundreds of people if the explosives he tried to detonate had worked," Lieberman said.

"What we know about the Abdulmutallab case raises two big, urgent questions that we are holding this hearing to answer: Why aren't airline passengers flying into the U.S. checked against the broadest terrorist database, and why isn't whole body scanning technology that can detect explosives in wider use?"

Flawed Logic Used in Partisan Attack on Obama

In the March 3, 2009 article "The Obama Economy," The Wall Street Journal argued that the decline of the Dow Jones Industrial Average (the Dow) in the first six weeks of Barack Obama's presidency was evidence of the failure of his economic policies. The Dow had fallen from 7949 on Inauguration Day (January 20) to 6763 on March 2. Today (August 20), the Dow closed at 9350. That is more than a 17% increase in the first seven months of Obama's administration. (Try getting that rate of return from a bank account.) So why hasn't The Wall Street Journal published a follow up story explaining how this significant increase in the stock market proves that Obama's policies were right all along?

The answer is that the original story was a cheap, partisan, unsigned attack based on flawed logic. See my original critique of the article for an explanation.

Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.

An episode of The West Wing mentions "post hoc, ergo propter hoc," the fallacy of logic that because one event precedes another, the prior event CAUSED the latter. The English translation of the phrase is "After it, therefore because of it."

See also Post hoc ergo, propter hoc.

Post hoc, ergo propter hoc

Post hoc, ergo propter hoc is a fallacy of logic frequently found in discussions of economics and politics (and many other areas).

The Nizkor Project provides a good explanation:

Also Known as: Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc, False Cause, Questionable Cause, Confusing Coincidental Relationships With Causes

Description of Post Hoc

A Post Hoc is a fallacy with the following form:

1. A occurs before B.
2. Therefore A is the cause of B.

The Post Hoc fallacy derives its name from the Latin phrase "Post hoc, ergo propter hoc." This has been traditionally interpreted as "After this, therefore because of this." This fallacy is committed when it is concluded that one event causes another simply because the proposed cause occurred before the proposed effect. More formally, the fallacy involves concluding that A causes or caused B because A occurs before B and there is not sufficient evidence to actually warrant such a claim.

It is evident in many cases that the mere fact that A occurs before B in no way indicates a causal relationship. For example, suppose Jill, who is in London, sneezed at the exact same time an earthquake started in California. It would clearly be irrational to arrest Jill for starting a natural disaster, since there is no reason to suspect any causal connection between the two events. While such cases are quite obvious, the Post Hoc fallacy is fairly common because there are cases in which there might be some connection between the events. For example, a person who has her computer crash after she installs a new piece of software would probably suspect that the software was to blame. If she simply concluded that the software caused the crash because it was installed before the crash she would be committing the Post Hoc fallacy. In such cases the fallacy would be committed because the evidence provided fails to justify acceptance of the causal claim. It is even theoretically possible for the fallacy to be committed when A really does cause B, provided that the "evidence" given consists only of the claim that A occured before B. The key to the Post Hoc fallacy is not that there is no causal connection between A and B. It is that adequate evidence has not been provided for a claim that A causes B. Thus, Post Hoc resembles a Hasty Generalization in that it involves making a leap to an unwarranted conclusion. In the case of the Post Hoc fallacy, that leap is to a causal claim instead of a general proposition.

Not surprisingly, many superstitions are probably based on Post Hoc reasoning. For example, suppose a person buys a good luck charm, does well on his exam, and then concludes that the good luck charm caused him to do well. This person would have fallen victim to the Post Hoc fallacy. This is not to say that all "superstitions" have no basis at all. For example, some "folk cures" have actually been found to work.

Post Hoc fallacies are typically committed because people are simply not careful enough when they reason. Leaping to a causal conclusion is always easier and faster than actually investigating the phenomenon. However, such leaps tend to land far from the truth of the matter. Because Post Hoc fallacies are committed by drawing an unjustified causal conclusion, the key to avoiding them is careful investigation. While it is true that causes precede effects (outside of Star Trek, anyways), it is not true that precedence makes something a cause of something else. Because of this, a causal investigation should begin with finding what occurs before the effect in question, but it should not end there.

Examples of Post Hoc

1. I had been doing pretty poorly this season. Then my girlfriend gave me this neon laces for my spikes and I won my next three races. Those laces must be good luck...if I keep on wearing them I can't help but win!

2. Bill purchases a new PowerMac and it works fine for months. He then buys and installs a new piece of software. The next time he starts up his Mac, it freezes. Bill concludes that the software must be the cause of the freeze.

3. Joan is scratched by a cat while visiting her friend. Two days later she comes down with a fever. Joan concludes that the cat's scratch must be the cause of her illness.

4. The Republicans pass a new tax reform law that benefits wealthly Americans. Shortly thereafter the economy takes a nose dive. The Democrats claim that the the tax reform caused the economic woes and they push to get rid of it.

5. The picture on Jim's old TV set goes out of focus. Jim goes over and strikes the TV soundly on the side and the picture goes back into focus. Jim tells his friend that hitting the TV fixed it.

6. Jane gets a rather large wart on her finger. Based on a story her father told her, she cuts a potato in half, rubs it on the wart and then buries it under the light of a full moon. Over the next month her wart shrinks and eventually vanishes. Jane writes her father to tell him how right he was about the cure.

An Illogical Attack of Obama's Economic Policies

The Wall Street Journal's March 3, 2009 article "The Obama Economy" claims the drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average (the Dow) is evidence of the failure of the new president's economic policies:

As the Dow keeps dropping, the President is running out of people to blame.

As 2009 opened, three weeks before Barack Obama took office, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 9034 on January 2, its highest level since the autumn panic. Yesterday the Dow fell another 4.24% to 6763, for an overall decline of 25% in two months and to its lowest level since 1997. The dismaying message here is that President Obama's policies have become part of the economy's problem.

Americans have welcomed the Obama era in the same spirit of hope the President campaigned on. But after five weeks in office, it's become clear that Mr. Obama's policies are slowing, if not stopping, what would otherwise be the normal process of economic recovery. From punishing business to squandering scarce national public resources, Team Obama is creating more uncertainty and less confidence -- and thus a longer period of recession or subpar growth.

The Democrats who now run Washington don't want to hear this, because they benefit from blaming all bad economic news on President Bush. And Mr. Obama has inherited an unusual recession deepened by credit problems, both of which will take time to climb out of. But it's also true that the economy has fallen far enough, and long enough, that much of the excess that led to recession is being worked off. Already 15 months old, the current recession will soon match the average length -- and average job loss -- of the last three postwar downturns. What goes down will come up -- unless destructive policies interfere with the sources of potential recovery.

And those sources have been forming for some time. The prices of oil and other commodities have fallen by two-thirds since their 2008 summer peak, which has the effect of a major tax cut. The world is awash in liquidity, thanks to monetary ease by the Federal Reserve and other central banks. Monetary policy operates with a lag, but last year's easing will eventually stir economic activity.

Housing prices have fallen 27% from their Case-Shiller peak, or some two-thirds of the way back to their historical trend. While still high, credit spreads are far from their peaks during the panic, and corporate borrowers are again able to tap the credit markets. As equities were signaling with their late 2008 rally and January top, growth should under normal circumstances begin to appear in the second half of this year.

So what has happened in the last two months? The economy has received no great new outside shock. Exchange rates and other prices have been stable, and there are no security crises of note. The reality of a sharp recession has been known and built into stock prices since last year's fourth quarter.

What is new is the unveiling of Mr. Obama's agenda and his approach to governance. Every new President has a finite stock of capital -- financial and political -- to deploy, and amid recession Mr. Obama has more than most. But one negative revelation has been the way he has chosen to spend his scarce resources on income transfers rather than growth promotion. Most of his "stimulus" spending was devoted to social programs, rather than public works, and nearly all of the tax cuts were devoted to income maintenance rather than to improving incentives to work or invest.

His Treasury has been making a similar mistake with its financial bailout plans. The banking system needs to work through its losses, and one necessary use of public capital is to assist in burning down those bad assets as fast as possible. Yet most of Team Obama's ministrations so far have gone toward triage and life support, rather than repair and recovery.

AIG yesterday received its fourth "rescue," including $70 billion in Troubled Asset Relief Program cash, without any clear business direction. (See here.) Citigroup's restructuring last week added not a dollar of new capital, and also no clear direction. Perhaps the imminent Treasury "stress tests" will clear the decks, but until they do the banks are all living in fear of becoming the next AIG. All of this squanders public money that could better go toward burning down bank debt.

The market has notably plunged since Mr. Obama introduced his budget last week, and that should be no surprise. The document was a declaration of hostility toward capitalists across the economy. Health-care stocks have dived on fears of new government mandates and price controls. Private lenders to students have been told they're no longer wanted. Anyone who uses carbon energy has been warned to expect a huge tax increase from cap and trade. And every risk-taker and investor now knows that another tax increase will slam the economy in 2011, unless Mr. Obama lets Speaker Nancy Pelosi impose one even earlier.

Meanwhile, Congress demands more bank lending even as it assails lenders and threatens to let judges rewrite mortgage contracts. The powers in Congress -- unrebuked by Mr. Obama -- are ridiculing and punishing the very capitalists who are essential to a sustainable recovery. The result has been a capital strike, and the return of the fear from last year that we could face a far deeper downturn. This is no way to nurture a wounded economy back to health.

Listening to Mr. Obama and his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, on the weekend, we couldn't help but wonder if they appreciate any of this. They seem preoccupied with going to the barricades against Republicans who wield little power, or picking a fight with Rush Limbaugh, as if this is the kind of economic leadership Americans want.

Perhaps they're reading the polls and figure they have two or three years before voters stop blaming Republicans and Mr. Bush for the economy. Even if that's right in the long run, in the meantime their assault on business and investors is delaying a recovery and ensuring that the expansion will be weaker than it should be when it finally does arrive.

There are two flaws in this critique of Obama, which is coming from someone whom I presume would be criticizing him regardless of the performance of the stock market or the economy. The editorial is yet another example of the post hoc ergo propter hoc flaw of logic that is all too common in political and economic discourse. For the sake of expedience, allow me to quote the Wikipedia entry:

Post hoc ergo propter hoc, Latin for "after this, therefore because (on account) of this", is a logical fallacy (of the questionable cause variety) which states, "Since that event followed this one, that event must have been caused by this one." It is often shortened to simply post hoc and is also sometimes referred to as false cause, coincidental correlation or correlation not causation. It is subtly different from the fallacy cum hoc ergo propter hoc, in which the chronological ordering of a correlation is insignificant.
Post hoc is a particularly tempting error because temporal sequence appears to be integral to causality. The fallacy lies in coming to a conclusion based solely on the order of events, rather than taking into account other factors that might rule out the connection. Most familiarly, many superstitious beliefs and magical thinking arise from this fallacy.

The form of the post hoc fallacy can be expressed as follows:
A occurred, then B occurred.
Therefore, A caused B.
When B is undesirable, this pattern is often extended in reverse: Avoiding A will prevent B.

From Attacking Faulty Reasoning by T. Edward Damer:[1]
“
I can't help but think that you are the cause of this problem; we never had any problem with the furnace until you moved into the apartment." The manager of the apartment house, on no stated grounds other than the temporal priority of the new tenant's occupancy, has assumed that the tenant's presence has some causal relationship to the furnace's becoming faulty.
”
From With Good Reason by S. Morris Engel:[2]
“
More and more young people are attending high schools and colleges today than ever before. Yet there is more juvenile delinquency and more alienation among the young. This makes it clear that these young people are being corrupted by their education.

The decline of stock markets since Obama took office is not proof that his policies caused the decline nor that his policies are not the appropriate ones to improve the economy. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) closed at 14,164.53 on October 9, 2007. On Election Day, November 4, 2008, the DJIA closed at 9,625.28. On January 20, 2009, the day of President Obama’s inauguration, the DJIA closed at 7,949.09. The stock markets were in decline long before Obama was elected or took office. The decline in the Dow since Obama became President is (7949 – 6763)/7949 = 0.149 or about 15%. The author picked an arbitrary date in January to imply a bigger decline. The decline in the Dow before Obama became President was (14164 – 7949)/14164 = .438 or about 44%. So if one wanted to use post hoc ergo propter hoc (and remember one shouldn’t), a more reasonable conclusion is that the last 15 months of President Bush’s policies were much more damaging to Wall Street than Obama’s leadership has been.

Another flaw in this editorial is the presumption that whatever is good for stock markets is good for the economy. I agree that health-care stocks have declined because of Obama’s plans to save taxpayers money by reining in rapidly rising medical costs. But that does not prove that Obama’s policies are detrimental to the economy as a whole. Consider the opposite. If Obama announced that he would give trillion dollar gifts to all the corporations in the Dow Jones Industrial Average for no use other than to make them more profitable, the stocks of the benefitting companies would undoubtedly rise. But such a policy would add tremendously to the public debt burden of future generations without doing anything to increase the productivity of the economy or improve its long-term health. It is a mistake to assume that anything that benefits the wealthy or business interests (such as tax cuts and deregulation) is necessarily good for the economy. Some increases or decreases in taxes and government regulation of business may be beneficial to society as a whole. Others are not.

The author is critical of the income transfers in the stimulus package, preferring spending on public works. But the fundamental cause of this recession is insufficient overall spending on newly produced goods and services. The logic behind the income transfers is that they are a quick way to inject purchasing power into the hands of those most likely to spend. The biggest downside of income transfers is that the money might not be spent on newly made U.S. products. It could be used to pay down credit card debt or to buy foreign-made products, such as the many Chinese goods at Wal-Mart. If the government spends the money directly, such as on infrastructure projects, it can ensure the money goes to U.S. companies with American workers. And there is a lasting benefit from public works spending because the new highways, repaired bridges, and more energy efficient government buildings will continue to provide benefits for many years to come. The largest downside of public works spending is that these projects can take a long time to complete and the economy needs the increased spending immediately. Indeed, the best criticism of the stimulus package is that by the time some of its spending occurs, the recession might be over. (Then again, it might not.)

The criticism that the tax cuts are “devoted to income maintenance rather than to improving incentives to work or invest,” is a gilded way to assert that they should have been given to rich people and wealthy corporations rather than to low and middle-income Americans. By preserving incomes with tax reductions, the government is trying to maintain the purchasing power of the overall economy and prevent the recession from worsening. Tax policy can be used to alter society’s behavior, such as to encourage research and development or investment in physical capital. But those effects kick in much later than the immediate impact of income maintenance. And many of the tax cuts advocated by the rich are not structured to have targeted benefits to the economy. And I have always had difficulty with the theoretical argument that tax cuts increase the incentive to work. Everyone I know with a 9 to 5 job works 40 hours per week regardless of which tax bracket they are in. I have never had anyone tell me he or she works more or less because of changes in tax rates.

Anyone who has taken a class from me should know I am a huge advocate of markets and capitalism. But it is not a blind or ideological devotion. Capitalism and the markets it creates have a potentially destructive aspect. Unregulated markets can cause massive damage to society. (In the absence of government regulation, the market system allowed so much pollution into the environment that in 1969 the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio literally caught on fire.) The important question is the appropriate degree of regulation. In a capitalist system, banks, like other profit-seeking businesses, should be allowed to fail. Yet, banks play a much different role in our economy than other businesses. The ability to borrow money does facilitate the overall spending that maintains our economy. And it is the inability to borrow and a lack of confidence in the financial sector that are critical components of our current economic troubles. Most financial experts believe failing to prop up these financial institutions would be devastating to our economy. Indeed, a common criticism of the handling of the financial crisis by President George W. Bush’s Secretary of the Treasury, Hank Paulson, is that he allowed the Lehman Brothers financial services company to go bankrupt, worsening the meltdown. In the absence of sufficient government regulation, banks became too large, too intertwined, and were allowed to engage in activities with too much risk. I believe the biggest mistake was to allow individual banks to become “too big to fail.” If government regulation had prevented much of the consolidation in the banking industry and had maintained a financial system with numerous smaller banks, it would be much easier to forego bailouts and let the worst ones fail.