The Tories lose in America, again

Tina Brown of Newsweek/The Daily Beast must feel like she really did her job this week. Her magazine ran a cover story written by Niall Ferguson entitled “Obama’s Gotta Go.” That in itself would be provocative enough to sell a lot of magazines to the casual buyer at the airport or in the supermarket. But then it got better. A whole bunch of economists and other policy wonks read it and found it . . . wanting. In fact, they found it to be disingenuous, fraudulent in its selective use of facts, and altogether a huge piece of Fail. Brad DeLong does yeoman’s work picking up the links to columns, blog posts, and other items which point out Ferguson’s errors.

Scott Lemieux corrects Ferguson’s assertion that 50% of Americans pay no taxes, reminding him not-so-gently that that’s only true if you only count income taxes. Almost everybody pays payroll taxes, and even those who don’t pay those pay sales taxes and possibly property taxes.

Paul Krugman points out that Ferguson’s assertion that the Affordable Care Act increases the deficit is incorrect, according to the neutral parties at the CBO.

DeLong himself shows that Ferguson, attempting to correct Krugman, claims he deliberately told a lie in his original article to imply that the ACA increased the deficit, fully knowing otherwise.

Jim Fallows shows that Ferguson’s assertion that the job market is still down 4.3 million from where it was earlier in Obama’s term is only true if you start counting a full year ahead of Obama’s inauguration. For good measure, Fallows notes that Ferguson wonders that Obama polls fairly strongly on national security. Fallows says dryly, “Remarkably the name Osama bin Laden does not appear in this article.”

Not finally (there are more rebuttals elseweb), but for our purposes, Matthew O’Brien completely eviscerates Ferguson item-by-item.

All in all, Mr. Ferguson should at minimum be a little embarrassed, I’d say.

One Comment

  1. That implies that Niall Ferguson feels any form of embarrassment in him. I personally do not think so. Facts are fungible to people like him.

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