Life on the Low Road -- When Krugman gets caught, he lies a little more.

February 05, 2004, 8:56 a.m.

Life on the Low Road
When Krugman gets caught, he lies a little more.

What do you do when you're caught saying something that turns out to be wrong — or worse yet, a lie? There are four roads you can take, one high and three low.

Most people take the high road. They admit their fault, they retract the mistake or the lie, and they replace it with the truth. New York Times columnists, on the other hand, usually take one of the other three roads — the low roads. And they can get away with it because of a policy of the paper that leaves corrections entirely at their own discretion. (Overheard on the PA system at W. 43rd Street: "Paging Mr. Fox ... please report to the henhouse immediately!")

Times columnists usually take the low road of just ignoring the whole matter. Or sometimes they'll restate the error or lie in a future column in a way that corrects it — but without ever mentioning that it had ever been stated any other way. The classic example of this is Maureen Dowd's infamous treatment of a quote from President Bush. In a column, Dowd foreshortened the quote in a way that distorted its meaning. She then published the entire quotation in a column several weeks later, with no admission of prior fault.

But then there's Paul Krugman. America's most dangerous liberal pundit often takes the lowest road of all. When the Krugman Truth Squad catches him in a bald-faced lie, he takes the opportunity to tell another lie. A Krugman correction isn't the act of a journalist seeking to set the record straight. It's the act of an assassin: His first shot missed, so he'll take another one.

In four years of Krugman columns in the Times — a period over which the Truth Squad has documented a vast collection of errors, distortions, misquotations, invented quotations, contradictions, and downright lies — Krugman has made only two corrections worthy of that name. In January 2002 the Times ran a formal correction in which Krugman apologized to his bete noir Larry Kudlow for wrongly attributing an embarrassing statement to him. Nine months later, in a column, Krugman confessed error in citing unsubstantiated reporting about financial malfeasance by Secretary of the Army Thomas White (he had relied on research notes supplied to him by Jason Leopold, whom the Times itself later reported had been accused of plagiarism by the Financial Times with respect to the same story, and who had earlier resigned from Dow Jones as concerns emerged about the accuracy of his reporting for the Wall Street Journal.)

But the rest of the time, Krugman "corrections" look more like one that appeared in his Times column Monday, in which he replaced one lie with a bigger lie. Here's the whole story.

The original lie appeared in Krugman's January 27 column. There he wrote of a conspiracy of conservative think tanks to create an "urban legend" that an explosion in government spending has been responsible for the federal deficit. He said,

According to cleverly misleading reports from the Heritage Foundation and other like-minded sources, the deficit is growing because Mr. Bush isn't sufficiently conservative: he's allowing runaway growth in domestic spending ... Is domestic spending really exploding? Think about it: farm subsidies aside, which domestic programs have received lavish budget increases over the last three years? Education? Don't be silly ... In fact, many government agencies are severely underfinanced.

After dissecting that column in a Krugman Truth Squad report for National Review Online, I was contacted by the author of those "cleverly misleading reports," Brian Riedl, a fellow for federal budgetary affairs at the Heritage Foundation. In a particularly delicious coincidence, it just so happens that Riedl was once an economics student of Professor Krugman's at the Woodrow Wilson School of Princeton University. While Riedl was flattered that his "cleverly misleading reports" had been singled out by a former teacher — especially one whose own work reflects such deep expertise in all things cleverly misleading — he nevertheless wished to set the record straight. He did so in a devastating post on my website last week. There he reprised some of the highpoints from his many Heritage reports on spending. For example,

Professor Krugman asserted that education spending is not increasing. In reality it jumped from $35 billion to $58 billion (65%) [in the two years] from 2001 to 2003.

Professor Krugman draws a blank after asking 'farm subsidies aside, which domestic programs have received lavish budget increases over the last three years?' The answer he couldn't provide:

unemployment benefits (85%)
education (65%)
general government (63%)
air transportation (52%)
community/regional development (43%)
health research (32%)
veterans' assistance (27%)
Medicaid (24%) and
income security programs (21%).

And these spending increases occurred in just two years (2001 to 2003) — a period even shorter than Professor Krugman's three-year range.

Think how Professor Krugman must have felt about that. His own student giving him an "F" — and in public, no less. So what does Krugman do? Instead of acknowledging that he was wrong and that Riedl was right, he accuses Riedl of "innuendo." Get this:

Over the past few months, many pundits have obediently placed the onus for rising deficits on "a vast increase in discretionary domestic spending," or words to that effect. By the way, the Heritage Foundation, which has orchestrated this campaign, is cagier than those pundits; it covers itself by relying on innuendo, never saying outright that domestic discretionary spending is the source of the deficit.

Huh? First Heritage is "cleverly misleading" because it said that spending is causing the deficits. And now it's charged with "innuendo" because it didn't say spending is causing the deficits?

When I discussed this with Riedl this week he was nonplussed. "I have no idea where he's coming from with this," he said, wondering why Krugman was now emphasizing Heritage's treatment of discretionary spending. He pointed me to many papers, such as last December's chiller, "$20,000 per Household: The Highest Level of Federal Spending Since World War II," in which he lays out the terrifying realities of exploding spending in both mandatory and discretionary categories.

Indeed, the innuendo is all Krugman's, because the distinction between mandatory and discretionary is a false one. The point is that the president and the Republican Congress have permitted an explosion in discretionary spending, putting in place whole new mandatory spending programs, at a time when expenditures for the mandatory programs already in place were rising to begin with. Heritage has been all over all this spending from the beginning. Riedl says, "Go to our web page. You will be inundated by papers."

Krugman still owes Riedl and the Times readers a correction for his first error in saying there is no explosion in spending — there is, and Riedl's got the goods. And now he owes Riedl and the Heritage Foundation an apology for his innuendo about Heritage's innuendo — intended to cover the tracks of his original error with a thick layer of partisan attack. But until the Times changes its corrections policy, we'll see no real accountability from Krugman or any other Times columnist.

Krugman Truth Squad member Robert Cox of the National Debate website has reported that Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., has committed to ask new "public editor" Daniel Okrent to review the columnist-corrections policy. Okrent has, in fact, told me for the record that he is reviewing the policy. Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis refused to comment, saying, "As a matter of policy, we do not discuss what the public editor is planning to write before he does so."

Reasonable people may disagree about Krugman's politics. They might even disagree as to his methods, considering that his is merely an "opinion" column. But it seems virtually axiomatic, in my judgment, with respect to matters of factual accuracy, that a great newspaper like the New York Times hold its columnists to the same corrections standard that instructs the rest of the paper's staff.

If you agree, why not send a short and respectful note to Okrent. Go ahead. He's the "public editor," and you are the public. His email address is public@nytimes.com.

— Donald Luskin is chief investment officer of Trend Macrolytics LLC, an independent economics and investment-research firm. He welcomes your comments at don@trendmacro.com.

Spending Percent of Increase 2-year $296 Percent billion increase ------------------------- -------- ---------------- unemployment benefits 85 9 education 65 8 general government 63 3 air transportation 52 2 community/regional development 43 2 health research 32 5 veterans' assistance 27 4 Medicaid 24 11 income security programs 21 11 National Defense 33 34 9/11-Induced spending NA 11 Social Security 8 11 Medicare 12 9 Other Programs 1 1 Net Interest -27 -18 ---- 100

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	http://www.nationalreview.com/nrof_luskin/truthsquad200402050856.asp