The Krugman Contest

I sometimes look back over my posts on this blog and wonder how I became such a conservative; I never would have imagined it several years ago.

One of the major turning points for me of course, as for many others, was the Bork hearings in 1987. I took away a deeply abiding distrust of Biden and Leahy: they are masters of smear without conscience. But even those hearings only effected a slight, and reluctant, change in political orientation.

One of the most recent influences, however, has been the New York Times and its columnists. I subscribed to the NYT for a couple years when commuting weekly to Boston. I had a little apartment there, with nothing to do outside of my work hours except read newspapers and watch TV. Rather than subscribe to the Boston Globe, I chose to take the NYT since I could learn what was in the Globe at the lunch table every day. I found the blatant bias in the NYT very offputting -- the misuse of statistics, especially.

I often read the NYT with a calculator because I discovered the most telling facts were often buried in the articles, contradicting the headlines. A good, recent and typical example, though after my two-year subscription, was the NYT's reporting on Bush's proposal to "cut Medicaid spending by $10 billion." An alert reader with a calculator could mine the truth out of that article: Bush proposed a $2.5 billion reduction in the $30 billion automatic annual increase in the federal Medicaid budget over 4 years. In other words, Bush proposed a reduction in the rate of automatic increase from 15% to 13.75%, a very reasonable proposal and not at all the dramatic cut in spending the NYT attempted to mislead their readers into believing. The numbers were actually in the article -- cleverly disguised.

Nowhere is this distortion more rampant that in Paul Krugman's columns. Donald Okrent, the NYT's departing readers' representative, is finally coming clean about Krugman.

Op-Ed columnist Paul Krugman has the disturbing habit of shaping, slicing and selectively citing numbers . . . I laid off for so long because I also believe that columnists are entitled by their mandate to engage in the unfair use of statistics, the misleading representation of opposing positions, and the conscious withholding of contrary data. But because they’re entitled doesn’t mean I or you have to like it, or think it’s good for the newspaper.

Krugman is the Biden/Leahy of economics: truth is expendible, the smear is all.

The Krugman Truth Squad has a contest for the best-ever, most-outrageous Krugman statements in six categories. This ought to be fun.