Time for me to go.

Well, folks, it’s been fun, but it’s time for me to sign off. The myserious DK will be with you over the weekend, and then I believe Josh will make his return next week. As for me, this is not only the end of my guest-blogging stint, but actually the end of my time as a member of the TPM Media team. It’s been a great experience, and I very much admire the whole enterprise, but for various reasons I’ve decided to return my blogging to its original state — a single site — at the easy to remember URL MatthewYglesias.com; please check it out.

As a parting thought, let me just observe that not only has Bush made a mess of domestic policy, and a stupendous mess of national security policy, but he’s also overseen the continuing humiliation of USA Senior Men’s Basketball at the hands of sundry foreign elements. It’s a truly pathetic record.

Kill the poor? Elizabeth Warren observes:

When I talk with families about politics, I often hear a variation on this theme: “Democrats care most about the poor. They tell me I’m better off than the poor, and that I should give up more of my money to help the poor. Well, I’m stretched to the breaking point, and I just can’t do it any more.” Whenever a Democrat stands up and says, “I’ll help every child go to college,” then cuts off benefits at $20,000 a year, the message just burns deeper.

Now, no doubt Warren does hear this from people. Nevertheless, it’s worth mentioning that it’s not actually true. Which Democrat, for example, has proposed a college assistance program with a $20,000 / year family income cut-off? Indeed, as part of the innovation agenda, the House Democrats formally committed themselves to “Make college tuition tax-deductible for students studying math, science, technology, and engineering.” This, it’s worth noting, will do exactly nothing to help poor families. Their kids, for one thing, are very unlikely to go to college, thanks to inequities in the secondary school system and various other challenges. What’s more, if you make less than $20 grand a year and have kids, your income tax burden is going to be extremely low. A standard middle class family will send their kids off to state school and making tuition tax deductible will save them a couple hundred bucks a year.

A rich family, by contrast, is going to send their kids to an expensive private college where tuition will run almost $40,000 a year. And since the family is in a high tax bracket, the deduction will be worth thousands of dollars.

Now, politics is all about perception, and so it’s very possible that the Democrats are perceived as favoring narrowly targeted programs that only help the poor. Insofar as that’s true, it’s a noteworthy fact about the country. But the perception is wrong and that’s worth pointing out.

College gives financial aid to students from poor families while the wealthier ones pay their way, right? That’s the point, after all. Well, not so much and the trend is getting worse.

Chris Van Hollen does his penance for mild dissent from the AIPAC line.

“[Iran’s] progress is far less than expected,” said David Albright, a nuclear expert who is president of the Institute for Science and International Security. “Whether it’s because of technical problems or self-restraint it’s hard to gauge, but I don’t think the U.S. can deliver on its promise to get hard sanctions when Iran is barely progressing.”

There’s still an issue here, a real one. The spread of nuclear weapons is against the interests of the United States and the creation of a viable global non-proliferation framework is very much in our interests. But there’s no need for panic and paranoia, sentiments that are being fed in this country by a combination of GOP political needs and the fact that many of the Bush administration’s leading lights just are panicky and paranoid in their approach to the world.

The wages of confusion. Bush today:

If America were to pull out before Iraq can defend itself, the consequences would be absolutely predictable — and absolutely disastrous. We would be handing Iraq over to our worst enemies — Saddam’s former henchmen, armed groups with ties to Iran, and al Qaeda terrorists from all over the world who would suddenly have a base of operations far more valuable than Afghanistan under the Taliban.

I and everyone else have been complaining awhile about Bush’s habit of conflating various groups. We see here, though, that this isn’t just some matter of intellectual fastidiousness. The idea here is that absent the US military, we would be handing Iraq over to some nefarious — and, admittedly, it would be quite nefarious — coalition of Baathists, Iranians, and al-Qaedists, presumably joined by Dr. Evil and the Cobra Commander. Back in the real world, though, these groups are fighting each other. What’s more, the “armed groups with ties to Iran” include the political parties that comprise the Iraqi government. So what is it our troops are accomplishing amidst this frothy mix of bad actors?

In all seriousness, what? Because here’s the rub. If we were looking at a situation where maybe the decision to launch the war didn’t look like such a hot idea, and maybe the reconstruction had proven much more difficult than we’d hoped, and maybe the slog so far had been long and hard and looked to continue to be long and hard for a while, I still could easily see myself convinced that the best thing to do was stay firm and continue with the policy. But looking back over, say, the past three years since the end of our first summer in Iraq, it doesn’t appear to be the case that the situation has improved at all with regard to the problems Bush is pointing to. So what, honestly, is the point? What about the events of the past year makes it look like things will be better one year from today? Already, the apparent gains from the Baghdad security initiative are looking mighty short-lived, just as every skepticism-minded person predicted.

Cato welfare dude Michael Tanner argues that “since Lyndon Johnson declared War on Poverty in 1964, the poverty rate is perilously close to where we began more than 40 years ago.” He notes that if “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. What does that say about our welfare policy?” But look at the historical tables in 1964, 19 percent of the population was poor. Today, that’s 12.6 percent. There are around 300 million people in America, so the 6.4 percentage point diminution in poverty is worth about 19.2 million non-impoverished people. By comparison, just 17.8 million people live in Florida.

Back to the table, though, and you’ll see that poverty actually fell quite rapidly from 19 percent in 1964 to 12.6 percent in 1970. Throughout the seventies, the average poverty rate was about 11.8 percent. At around the end of this period Ronald Reagan falsely claimed that the war on poverty had failed (as you can see, poverty rates fell dramatically) and curtailed anti-poverty programs. As a result, since then poverty rates have largely bounced up and down roughly in step with broad macroeconomic trends, but have never re-reached the seventies-vintage lows on a sustained basis.

So, yes, whether or not you favor spending money on giving stuff to poor people, it remains the case that — surprise! — poor people benefit from those services.

More on the “dramatic decline” in SAT scores. S.M. writes:

I’ve been tutoring high school students for a number of years now, helping them prepare for their SATs. In the current discussion about the decline in test scores, it’s important to note that not only was the test lengthened and a writing section added, but the actual content of the reading and math sections was changed. The analogy section (in my opinion as a linguist, the most interesting and insightful part of the old test) has been replaced by questions based on short reading selections, and the math problems are mildly more difficult in the moderate/hard range than they were just a few years ago. The changes in the reading are such that more students, often very good ones, don’t have enough time to finish a section. Add to all this the fact that the overall length of the test is dramatically increased and it’s no wonder that average scores are declining a bit. I’m actually surprised that the reported decline is as small as it is.

A.B. concurs:

While making shockingly little money at my first job in DC, I worked at second job at a test-prep firm in Bethesda. As part of my job, I took the new SAT last year. And, much to my chagrin, I did worse than I did in high school — way worse. This may be a product of the fact that I have already been to college and didn’t have a lot riding on the test, but I think it also had something to do with the fact that the new test is hideously long. I have had students who probably would have tried the test a second or third time to raise their scores, had the first one not been such a miserable experience. No matter what the College Board says, fatigue is a factor, and students who have had professional preparation to deal with that fatigue are going to do better. (Students who have had professional counseling on how to convince the College Board to let them take the test over several days are way out front on this.) We shouldn’t just be worried about a small dip in the scores, we should be worried about the achievement gap that changes in the test is opening.

I haven’t heard from anyone with relevant experience taking the Post‘s alarmist line.

Back to Iran. Talk of a unified Qaeda/Iran/Hezbollah/Syria menace is nonsense as a casual scan of actual Sunni jihadist views will make clear. As Fred Kaplan notes, if Churchill and FDR had operated with the Bush mentality, “they might not have formed an alliance with the Soviet Union (out of a refusal to negotiate with evil Communists), and they might have therefore lost the war.”

It’s worse than that, though — they might have proposed attacking the Soviet Union in the middle of the war because Bolshevism and Nazism were both species of Eurofascism.

Reader M.E. reminds me that The Washington Post is part of the same business enterprise as the Kaplan test prep company and therefore has a large financial interest in spreading paranoia about SAT performance.

Normally, I don’t like to fling these kind of “follow the money” accusations around without evidence, but it is true that I don’t see the country’s other major newspapers describing a 0.7 percent decline in scores as “dramatic.”