Niall Ferguson’s Newsweek cover story “Hit the Road, Barack” has attracted lots of the wrong kind of attention. As Dean Baker put it:
It’s hard to believe that progressive bloggers didn’t get together to pay Newsweek to run Niall Ferguson’s piece on Obama. The thing is so shot full of easily identifiable errors no serious publication would ever allow it into print.
But printed it was–a lengthy cover-story argument against re-electing Obama, based on an array of charts and economic facts that the Harvard professor believes bolster his case.
The first–and arguably most important–error was flagged in a blog post by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. Ferguson wrote:
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.
As Krugman pointed out, that’s a totally misleading characterization of what the CBO said. He wrote that as
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.
So how did Ferguson get that wrong? Well, if you ask him, he didn’t. He explains in his response that the CBO report says the coverage provisions of the law cost what he says they cost. Which is true. But that’s also not what he wrote. Look back at the first sentence of that excerpt: “The president pledged that health-care reform would not add a cent to the deficit.” The CBO says the law saves money: Expanding insurance costs money, but the taxes, penalties and cost-saving measures save more money.
Ferguson is wrong on the facts. But he makes matters worse; Ferguson edits the CBO report to his liking. He points to this passage:
The combination of those policies, prior law regarding payment rates for physicians’ services in Medicare, and other information has led CBO to project that the growth rate of Medicare spending (per beneficiary, adjusted for overall inflation) will drop from about 4 percent per year, which it has averaged for the past two decades, to about 2 percent per year on average for the next two decades. It is unclear whether such a reduction can be achieved …”
Ferguson zeroes in on the last line, writing: “Indeed, it is, which is why I wrote what I wrote.”
But that sentence of the CBO report continued, as Politico‘s Dylan Byers noted:
Ferguson cut the CBO excerpt off mid-sentence and changed the meaning entirely. Here is how that last sentence in the excerpt actually reads:
It is unclear whether such a reduction can be achieved through greater efficiencies in the delivery of healthcare or will instead reduce access to care or the quality of care (relative to the situation under prior law.)
So contrary to what Ferguson leads readers to believe, the CBO report does not state that the reduction is “unclear.” What is “unclear” is whether the reduction will come through greater efficiencies in healthcare delivery or reduced access to care.
Once you understand that this is the level of dishonesty, there’s not much more that needs be said. But the piece is actually full of similarly muddled arguments. Such as:
Certainly, the stock market is well up (by 74 percent) relative to the close on Inauguration Day 2009. But the total number of private-sector jobs is still 4.3 million below the January 2008 peak.
That would be an even more convincing case against Obama if you could argue he was president during 2008.
One of Ferguson’s arguments is pulled right from the Fox News/talk radio playbook:
Welcome to Obama’s America: Nearly half the population is not represented on a taxable return–almost exactly the same proportion that lives in a household where at least one member receives some type of government benefit. We are becoming the 50-50 nation–half of us paying the taxes, the other half receiving the benefits.
Of course, the first thing to point out is that most people who pay no federal income tax pay an array of other taxes, from sales tax to payroll taxes.
And as the Tax Policy Center explained, about half of the people are in this “receiving benefits” category “because their incomes are so low that they are less than the sum of the standard deduction and personal and dependent exemptions for which the household qualifies.”
Presumably Obama is to blame for that. Another 22 percent in this category are free-loading senior citizens.
Other parts of the Ferguson piece aren’t so much misleading as they are simply incoherent. As Slate’s Matthew Yglesias pointed out, Ferguson uses a chart showing the rise of China’s GDP to argue…well, something. Apparently Obama should be doing more to slow the growth of the Chinese economy.
In Krugman’s original post, he mentioned–seemingly as a throwaway line–“I guess they don’t do factchecking.” Well, it turns out that Newsweek actually doesn’t:
“We, like other news organizations today, rely on our writers to submit factually accurate material,” Newsweek spokesman Andrew Kirk told Politico.
The magazine went on tell Politico‘s Byers that it “continues to monitor the debate.” Well, that’s something.
That chart Yglesias reposts is worth looking at. Ferguson uses it to suggest that Obama should be matching China’s growth rate, which is absurd. But it actually shows that the U.S. economy under Obama has been doing well compared to the much more comparable economies of Europe–whose austerity policies are more similar to those advocated by Romney. It’s a strange illustration for an anti-Obama article.
Typical corpress chicanerismo.
But why caught my eye was Baker’s comment.
I think it says a great deal about what passes for “progressive” ’round these parts when folks claiming the label are expected to rush to the defense of an admin that from foreign policy to environmental protection to economic justice to basic rights has been anything but.
But maybe “progressive” these days is politically equivalent to “liberal”.
In which case …
Never mind.
Doug, I believe you expect too much.
The last President to try to take on the military, wall street, and the insurers was Jimmy Carter. Before him was Kennedy.
If the Libertarian candidate wins, they won’t achieve 1/50th of their agenda.
Jacob, I’m not sure how libertarianism entered the conversation, and apparently I’m reading from a far different history book than you …
But it’s not a matter of what *I* expect.
It’s a matter of what *we* must demand, if we’re to have any chance at not only justice, but survival.
Personally, I wouldn’t put money on it.
But it’s the game we’re given
So, game on.
Niall Ferguson lost me when, in his PBS series, he had praise for the economic revival Pinochet brought to Chile.
The whole “free market/vicious authoritarian government” blessing of the criminal Pinochet regime was disgusting.
PBS had already lost me by that time.
Ferguson’s insanity is well documented here:
His view of the war could be characterised in the same way. A section in the Pity of War on the question of prisoner massacres—that might in another book have been a serious discussion of the authenticity of accounts of massacres, comparison of the practices of the different armies and regiments, and an examination of the contexts in which specific massacres took place, etc.,—becomes a voyeuristic tour of scenes of human brutality and degradation. Ferguson does not set out to chronicle or explain the atrocities, but glories in them. He uses emotive, non-rational rhetorical methods to create an impression—that war is good and death, whether inflicted, observed or experienced, exhilarating. The First World War, we are told, was fun, a thrill, and “a great lark”. The reason why men continued to fight was, he suggests, “because they wanted to.”
Ferguson uses letters, diaries and memoirs to construct a view of the First World War in which men and women were fascinated by death, sex and violence. Of course the documents that express those views have always been there. The question is what emphasis the rational and objective historian places upon them. Ferguson chooses to emphasise these psychologically aberrant views and manufacture out of the psychopathology of human beings at war a scene of Nietzschian ecstasy induced by some sort of primeval death instinct.
A profoundly disturbing image emerges, not so much of the First World War, the psychological effects of which have been well documented and studied in subsequent conflicts, but of the state of modern history.
For most of the twentieth century, even right-wing historians have had to adapt themselves to the political and ideological consequences of the Russian Revolution—how the world’s first successful socialist revolution inspired millions in a belief that there was an alternative to imperialist brutality, a belief that survived even after the bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet Union under Stalin. It was de rigueur to deplore the slaughter of the First World War, but now there is a generation of historians who are increasingly eager to revise the judgement of earlier researchers. They can do so without doing obvious violence to evidence and principles of historical methodology. At a cursory glance all the apparatus of a history book is present in The Pity of War. There are extracts from contemporary accounts by statesmen, generals and ordinary soldiers from all sides; there are statistics, economic, military and sociological; there are contemporary photographs showing scenes of carnage and men relaxing behind the lines. There are, of course, extensive footnotes. The immediate impression is of a book at once scholarly yet sensitive. On closer inspection, however, a very different book emerges. It is a carefully camouflaged glorification of war.
When in Colossus Ferguson praises the organised hypocrisy by which imperial governments function he is not merely noting it, he is advocating it as a principle of policy. Any historian might describe the role of organised hypocrisy in the course of historical events and analyse its social, political and economic origins, its causes and effects. Ever since Ranke, who was the first to use the records of the chancelleries of Europe which were just then beginning to become available, historians have tried to get back to original sources. They want to read the policy documents, the minutes of meetings and the secret memoranda not just the public speeches, press statements and the self-justificatory memoirs. Their professional vocation has always been to uncover the organised hypocrisy that governments practice, not to advocate it. In doing so Ferguson places a large question mark over his own work. When the historian thinks hypocrisy is justified how can his work be trusted? Books written on this basis have ceased to be works of history and have become pure ideology.
What price an American empire?
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/dec2004/book1-d07.shtml
Part Two
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/dec2004/boo2-d08.shtml
Part Three
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/dec2004/boo3-d09.shtml
Niall Ferguson doesn’t need fact checking, he needs brain surgery.
The chart shows 61 percent paid payroll taxes. Doesn’t that mean they did pay income tax but it was at the right rate so they didn’t have to pay any MORE? Is that who they’re talking about? I just don’t get it (beyond the fact that they’re lying, sadistic louts).
I agree with Doug – it took me three readings before I understood what Baker meant (i.e., that Baker uses “progressive bloggers” as synonymous with “Obama supporters”), and I am surprised that Peter thought that this makes sense.
I am also surprised that the fact that budget balancing might very well be achieved by reducing the quality of healthcare is mentioned as a side point to the fact that Ferguson is a liar. Surely the first point is more important than the second.
I don’t watch tv and I don’t know who niall is, and who reads NewsweAk anyway?
Maybe I’m not the only one? : )
I am disturbed that the propaganda is still working in relation to Pres. Obama showing him to be a “Liberal” when he acts mostly like a Regressive. Only reluctantly doing Liberal or Progressive things. In earnest now because of the need for re-election. Then back to the crypto-fascist turn we have been moving to since 1980. The free market economics, church/state continuing combination as well as the corporation/state continuing intermingling. And the expansion, deepening, and widening the external empire while increasing the oppressiveness inside. Don’t forget the imperialist drone to murder US citizens even “suspected” of anything. And if found wrong a posthumous apology. Such is the soft side of growing power to flaunt any and all laws, either international or domestic. With no repercussions.
Niall Ferguson is an imperial historian and sees things from that point. So of course his views of historical events and country’s like ours in a way you and I would find appalling.
Ferguson is an amazingly bizarre — sick — thinker who is taken amazingly seriously in an amazing array of venues. The guy is sick. His narcissistic blather somehow passes for intellectual thought because he can string words together in important sounding ways. I was originally conned by book reviews, until I read his work. In his worldview it is fine for people to starve, be tortured, be told to slaughter one another and then go do it, engage in horrific acts, so long I guess, as none of that happens to him. The world isa video game, he and his ilk the guys with the controllers.
It’s his accent, Dr. Jordan. Most stupid and gullible people swoon when they hear that accent.
Mr Ferg has seen the light.Like so many other rats jumping ship Newsweek has followed suit.And all anyone can say is the facts are suspect?Well that can always be so.Also he may be far underselling the coming collapse.The article was a departure from the presses slavish drivel soft peddling Obamas massive failures,and trumpeting any small change in the wind.There will be more to come as Obama will be forced to talk about what he has done, and the numbers will give him little room to duck and dodge.As a long time political hack I would advise you not to get into the game of trying to deflect hid critics.Soon you wont enough time in the day.Just ignore….ignore…..ignore.It all you got.Fergusons fact are damn close on all counts.Lets just let Obamas words point the way.He said if he could not turn the economy around in his first term- he accepts being a one term president.Well said Mr President.Now hit the road
A late response to Carol Wheeler, in case you check this:
“Payroll taxes” refers to deductions for Social Security and Medicare. They are collected from the first dollar of income. Unlike federal income taxes, there is no minimum income below which they are not owed. That’s why people can pay payroll taxes without paying income taxes.
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