NUMBERS2357

Previously on reddit you said you'd cut 43% of the federal budget. The budget is 22% Social security, 23% Medicare and Medicaid, 19% defense, 17% other discretionary 13% other mandatory, 6% interest. How much would you cut from what?

Lemme ask the same question I asked Hanna Rosin - what do you think we can do to address the gender gap in college graduation rates? Also, same question but specifically for STEM fields?

In order to do this you'd have to gut 55% of each of Medicare, Medicaid, Defense, and all discretionary spending (if you cut them all evenly). So you'd support that?

1 - Jonathan Chait said about Vox:

Vox's combo of wonky, fact-laden policy explainers + dogmatic fact-free identity politics polemics is weird

And later said by "identity politics" he means articles about race and gender bias. Matt wrote an article about the phrase "identity politics" but do either of you have a response to the claim that articles on Vox about race and gender bias are dogmatic and fact free?

2 - The liberal blogosphere has always been about objectivity and not neutrality - saying that the old media would always assume the truth is halfway between what the two sides think, even if one side is just plain wrong. I'm assuming you both agree with this critique, but how do you ensure that you don't replace it with just a lazy assumption that the liberal side is objectively right? Yall are both liberals and it seems like this would be an easy trap to fall into - to not even look at the conservative claims because you're used to thinking "we don't have to pretend both sides are equally valid", and always deciding that the liberal claim is correct, until it's more force of habit than conscientious looking at the facts.

I ask because I think this happens sometimes with your site, particularly on articles about violence against women. Here is an article about the murky nature of the "1 in 5" claim about rape in colleges. Yet other articles just treat it as fact. This one repeats the claim, but the chart under #2 and the fact that 72% of rapes are committed by intimate partners implies that only 10% of women are raped, so it's internally contradictory. (the second article also links to the third for sources, but the third doesn't have sources for everything. In particular the claim that 1.3 million women are vicitmized annually, which IIRC had a cite when I first read it, but the cite also said that a much higher number of men are victimized than the rest of your article says).

3 - It seems like a lot of cultural criticism on the left, including Vox, is more about identifying one's self with liberal causes than actual commentating on music, movies, etc. Like deBoer says. Do you think this is true?

4 - Ezra says that "Affirmative Consent" is a terrible law and he supports it because it will change cultural views around sex and consent and have a sort of chilling effect. Are you worried that it might just lead people to view sexual assault policies as alarmist, out of touch with reality, biased, and safely ignored anyway because they're so uncommonly enforced (due to non-reporting and other things)? I think they might end up being like anti-drug education, or what you're taught about sex and STDs - so over the top and alarmist that kids just roll their eyes at the whole thing and assume it's just adults trying to rein in on their fun.

5 - If you could either have single payer health insurance or personally rewrite the entire nation's zoning laws, which would you do?

If issues with delayed gratification are the problem (or really any inherent difference between sexes), then it would seem that even if you mitigate said problem you wouldn't necessarily be able to totally eliminate it, which means you can narrow the gender gap but there will still always be one...do you think that's the case?