No, silly! They're for the commentariat -- for the media! I mean, who makes the most money from national elections? Not the national people but the national media. The "commentariat" as Paul Krugman calls them. Look at the choice of Paul Ryan, for example.
Mitt Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan as his running mate led to a wave of pundit accolades. Now, declared writer after writer, we’re going to have a real debate about the nation’s fiscal future. This was predictable: never mind the Tea Party, Mr. Ryan’s true constituency is the commentariat, which years ago decided that he was the Honest, Serious Conservative, whose proposals deserve respect even if you don’t like him.
But he isn’t and they don’t. Ryanomics is and always has been a con game, although to be fair, it has become even more of a con since Mr. Ryan joined the ticket. ...Paul Krugman, NYT
Quite apart from the money media corporations make, their employees build their own futures on deciding who gets to win, who loses. Sure, but the business of democracy gets done at the same time, doesn't it? Not if you like the kind of voting that comes from an informed populace.
Krugman runs through the con game being played now by the media on the right.
If we add up Mr. Ryan’s specific proposals, we have $4.3 trillion in tax cuts, partially offset by around $1.7 trillion in spending cuts — with the tax cuts, surprise, disproportionately benefiting the top 1 percent, while the spending cuts would primarily come at the expense of low-income families. Over all, the effect would be to increase the deficit by around two and a half trillion dollars. Yet Mr. Ryan claims to be a deficit hawk.
he says that he would offset his tax cuts by “base broadening,” eliminating enough tax deductions to make up the lost revenue. Which deductions would he eliminate? He refuses to say — and realistically, revenue gain on the scale he claims would be virtually impossible.
At the same time, he asserts that he would make huge further cuts in spending. What would he cut? He refuses to say. ...Paul Krugman, NYT
It's a con game. Congressman Ryan is saying, "Believe me..."
Of course, it's always possible we'd be safer if Ryan were tucked away in the obscure and humble office of the vice president rather than in Congress. But he may lose that seat in Congress, no matter what happens in his run for the vice presidency.
Which brings me to Rob Zerban. Don't forget Paul Ryan is also running (yes, it's legit) back home in Wisconsin, for another term in the House. He's running against Rob Zerban, an increasingly popular challenger. It's entirely possibly that Ryan will lose both the vice presidency and his seat in Congress, in spite of the support of the pundits in Washington. He may end up as another greying figure pounding a podium in another Koch-funded think tank tucked inside the Beltway.
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Niall Ferguson is a Brit and a Harvard historian in an endowed chair (Lawrence Tisch, real estate magnate). He's also another figure on the "Lie for Romney" bandwagon. Paul Krugman catches him out.
There are multiple errors and misrepresentations in Niall Ferguson’s cover story in Newsweek — I guess they don’t do fact-checking — but this is the one that jumped out at me. Ferguson says:
The president pledged that health-care reform would not add a cent to the deficit. But the CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation now estimate that the insurance-coverage provisions of the ACA will have a net cost of close to $1.2 trillion over the 2012–22 period.
Readers are no doubt meant to interpret this as saying that CBO found that the Act will increase the deficit. But anyone who actually read, or even skimmed, the CBO report (pdf) knows that it found that the ACA would reduce, not increase, the deficit — because the insurance subsidies were fully paid for.
Now, people on the right like to argue that the CBO was wrong. But that’s not the argument Ferguson is making — he is deliberately misleading readers, conveying the impression that the CBO had actually rejected Obama’s claim that health reform is deficit-neutral, when in fact the opposite is true. ...Paul Krugman
What's interesting about this is how his university will treat Ferguson. We may find him just slipping out of that endowed chair and into another public, but not academic, post. Maybe in the same think tank with Paul Ryan.
