Posted on 02/05/2004 8:03:53 AM PST by ReleaseTheHounds
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.
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http://www.nationalreview.com/nrof_luskin/truthsquad200402050856.asp
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As a long-time reader and subscriber to The New York Times, it has been my practice for many years to read the front page and the Editorial/OpEd sections as my primary source of morning news. Unfortunately, the OpEd page has been so riddled with errors over the past months that I can no longer rely on it as a source of objective information.
A corrections policy for the OpEd page that is congruent with the corrections policy of the paper as a whole would go a long way toward ensuring that reliable information is presented on a consistent basis. Obviously OpEd columnists have wide latitude with regards to what they write, but factual information should be reliable.
It is downright embarrassing to have relied on New York Times OpEds for factual information, only to be revealed as a fool for having taken easily verifiable errors at face value. The sad truth is that I now rely on the OpEd page for opinion only, but more or less assume that every factual matter and quote presented there must be verified by some other source before it can be relied upon.
Congressman Billybob
It has been interesting watching the NYT slip so quickly into the status of "irrelevancy" because of their willful bias, distortion, and lack of integrity. Sort of like the fall of Communism: I always knew that it was corrupt and would ultimately fall, but just didn't expect to see it in my lifetime. I think the NYT may be on the same track. JMHO.
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.
Following are the above numbers plus additional numbers from Riedl's original table in his Heritage Foundation backgrounder paper at http://www.cse.org/reports/heritagenov132003.pdf:
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 ---- 100As can be seen, he left off National Defense, 9/11-Induced spending, Social Security, and Medicare. Also, he left off the column that shows how much the increase of each program contributed to the total $296 billion increase.
In the original article, Krugman stated:
A recent study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities does the math. While overall government spending has risen rapidly since 2001, the great bulk of that increase can be attributed either to outlays on defense and homeland security, or to types of government spending, like unemployment insurance, that automatically rise when the economy is depressed.
National defense, 9/11-induced spending, and unemployment benefits do account for about 54% of the 2-year increase according to Rield's original table. In any case, Krugman continued:
Why, then, do we face the prospect of huge deficits as far as the eye can see? Part of the answer is the surge in defense and homeland security spending. The main reason for deficits, however, is that revenues have plunged. Federal tax receipts as a share of national income are now at their lowest level since 1950.
This last statement can be verified in the first graph and table at http://home.att.net/~rdavis2/def05.html. The just-released budget projects that receipts for 2004 will be 15.7% of GDP. This will be the lowest level since they were 14.4% of GDP in 1950. Now it is true that the budget projects that spending will have increased from 18.4% of GDP in 2000 to 20.2% of GDP in 2004, an increase of 1.8% of GDP. However, receipts are projected to have dropped from 20.9% of GDP in 2000 to 15.7% of GDP in 2004, a decrease of 5.2% of GDP. That is nearly three times the increase in spending. Hence, it would seem that the drop in receipts contributed much more to the deficit than the increase in spending.
Krugman's original article addressed outlays and receipts but Luskin's and Rield's response did not even mention receipts. That gives some indication of whose article is the more balanced.
He responded to me with a note that said he would "address that subject shortly." I think the fact that this Editor responded to me personally as a good sign. So, we shall see.
Congressman Billybob
Click here, then click the blue CFR button, to join the anti-CFR effort (or visit the "Hugh & Series, Critical & Pulled by JimRob" thread). Don't delay.
I did state my analysis of Luskin's column in message 15 above. I referred to the URL in message 16 so as not to repeat myself. So, now that I have stated my case, I am waiting for somebody to defend Luskin.
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