HANDY TEST WILL HELP YOU DISCOVER YOUR POLITICAL BENT

Saturday, September 28, 2002

Who's liberal? Who's conservative? Editorial writers often apply those labels to other people (especially people they disagree with), but how do they label themselves?

Not always accurately, it seems.

Last week I attended the annual convention of the National Conference of Editorial Writers in Nashville. A highlight of the convention is ``critique day,'' when we meet in groups of four or five to analyze and discuss editorials and columns exchanged by the participants several weeks before the convention. Preparing for critiques is a huge amount of work, but the experience is exhilarating.

It so chanced that the critique group I was assigned to included an editorial writer from The Los Angeles Times. In response to the question ``what is your paper's philosophical orientation?'' she said, ``Centrist.''

Well, now. To me, a paper is centrist if, considering all its editorial positions taken together, it has roughly as many people to its left as to its right. Unless the Times has had a complete brain transplant since I lived in Los Angeles in the early '90s, its editorial page is nowhere close to the center of American political opinion.

It's probably close to the center of opinion in its own newsroom, though, which helps to explain both the success of books about media bias -- for example, Bias by Bernard Goldberg and Coloring the News by William McGowan -- and the bewildered dismay of journalists who find themselves accused of slanting the news.

Editorials are supposed to have a slant, of course; the problem comes if the writers misperceive which way they're tilting. The Times writer went on to clarify her description, ``more liberal on social issues, more conservative on economic issues.''

As she explained in Nashville, she meant only to highlight the paper's relative position in these two areas. Still, it's an odd choice of words; why not say ``less liberal on economic issues''? What she said applies better to the News than it does to her own paper.

How to pin this down? There are many issues on which pretty much everybody agrees on which position is the conservative one, and which is the liberal one, no matter which one they support. Hardly anybody is 100 percent on either side, but if most of the positions you take are the liberal side, you're a liberal; if they're mostly conservative, so are you, and you get to call yourself a centrist if you split down the middle.

I enlisted the help of some friends at the Independence Institute in Golden (which has no problem with the conservative label) to help me come up with a diagnostic test for ``conservative on economic issues.''

Here's a partial list, and I'm not going to tell you which answers are which, because the whole point is that you already know.

1. Estate tax: a) make the repeal immediate; b) make the repeal permanent; c) leave the law as it is, but raise the exemption; d) let it come back into effect in 2011.

2. Dividends: a) leave the policy as is; b) make dividends tax-free; c) end the corporate income tax.

3. Alternative minimum tax: a) repeal it; b) raise the thresholds; c) leave as is.

4. Minimum wage: a) raise it; b) index it to inflation; c) require companies doing business with the city/county/state to pay a ``living wage.''

5. Social Security: a) protect it in its current form; b) allow workers to divert a third of their payroll tax into individually owned accounts; c) phase it out entirely in favor of a fully private system such as Chile's.

6. Takings: a) pay owners the fair market value of their property if it is taken for public use such as highways; b) pay owners the fair market value of their property if it is taken for a publicly supported project such as urban renewal to prevent blight; c) compensate owners if the fair market value of their property is decreased by government action, such as zoning or environmental protection.

7. Labor laws: a) strengthen Davis-Bacon to require union labor on all government contracts; b) leave the pay provisions of Davis-Bacon intact; c) repeal Davis-Bacon.

8. Welfare: a) move back toward Aid to Families with Dependent Children; b) leave our current policy basically as is; c) tighten the limits on cash benefits.

9. Medical costs: a) expand Medicare and Medicaid to cover prescription drugs and long-term care; b) require employers to offer basic medical benefits; c) allow tax credits for individually purchased medical insurance.

What's your label?