Praktgräl i USA, Paul Krugman mot Niall Fergusson om Obama, USA:s sjukvård och presidentvalet

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Det är kanske inte så konstigt att en hel del engelsmän söker sig till USA, och då inte bara till Hollywood. Man får språket gratis, det är ett kort hopp från London till New York och amerikanerna gillar den amerikanska brytningen som de alltid förknippar med kultur.

En av de engelsmän som lyckades över all förväntan var Christoper Hitchens som i som blev berömd över hela USA tack vare sin bok God is Not Great, som gavs ut i en halv miljon exemplar.

En annan intellektuell från Storbritannien, skotten Niall Fergusson är litet mer akademisk än Hitchens, han har en tjänst i Historia vid Harvard, är också knuten till Oxford och sist men inte minst, är knuten till tankesmedjan Hoover Institution här i Silicon Valley, en tillflyktsort för högertyper från Condi Rice till förre försvarsministern Donald Rumsfeld.

Fergusson har skrivit en originell bok om Storbritannien i Första Världskriget: The Pity of War: Explaining World War One som framför den idag knappast originella tesen att det hade varit bättre för Storbritannien att hålla sig neutral i Första Världskriget och låta Tyskland vinna, än att gå med och se hel generation av den egna befolkningen dö.

Fergusson har dock en akilleshäl, och det är att han liksom för den del även Hitchens, älskar att hårdflörta med de amerikanska republikanerna.

Som nu senast i en artikel om president Obama i den en gång så inflytelserika Newsweek där Fergusson, som stöder Romney och Ryan, helt felaktigt påstår att Obamas sjukvårdsplan kommer att öka USA:s budgetunderskott: Niall Ferguson: Obama’s Gotta Go. Why does Paul Ryan scare the president so much? Because Obama has broken his promises, and it’s clear that the GOP ticket’s path to prosperity is our only hope.

I was a good loser four years ago. “In the grand scheme of history,” I wrote the day after Barack Obama’s election as president, “four decades is not an especially long time. Yet in that brief period America has gone from the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. to the apotheosis of Barack Obama. You would not be human if you failed to acknowledge this as a cause for great rejoicing.

Despite having been—full disclosure—an adviser to John McCain, I acknowledged his opponent’s remarkable qualities: his soaring oratory, his cool, hard-to-ruffle temperament, and his near faultless campaign organization.

Yet the question confronting the country nearly four years later is not who was the better candidate four years ago. It is whether the winner has delivered on his promises. And the sad truth is that he has not.

In his inaugural address, Obama promised “not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth.” He promised to “build the roads and bridges, the electric grids, and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together.” He promised to “restore science to its rightful place and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its cost.” And he promised to “transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age.” Unfortunately the president’s scorecard on every single one of those bold pledges is pitiful.

Fergussons artikel var ungefär lika ärlig som Göran Lambertzs beskrivning av Thomas Quick-affären, och artikeln fick Nobelpristagaren och kolumnisten Paul Krugman att ta till storsläggan i en artikel i New York Times: Unethical Commentary, Newsweek Edition – NYTimes.com

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. More than that: by its very nature, health reform that expands coverage requires that lower-income families receive subsidies to make coverage affordable.

So of course reform comes with a positive number for subsidies — finding that this number is indeed positive says nothing at all about the impact on the deficit unless you ask whether and how the subsidies are paid for. Ferguson has to know this (unless he’s completely ignorant about the whole subject, which I guess has to be considered as a possibility). But he goes for the cheap shot anyway.

Även Ezra Klein i Washington Post har angripit Fergusson: The worst case against the Obama administration

That’s not the only time that Ferguson’s argument veers factually astray. He says that only “half of us [are] paying the taxes.” That’s not true: Only half of us are paying federal income taxes. Most all of us are paying payroll taxes, and state and local taxes.

He says that “The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) of 2010 did nothing to address the core defects of the system: the long-run explosion of Medicare costs as the baby boomers retire, the ‘fee for service’ model that drives health-care inflation.” If you don’t think the ACA did anything to address “fee for service” medicine, you simply don’t know anything about it.

He says, “The total number of private-sector jobs is still 4.3 million below the January 2008 peak.” You might remember that Obama didn’t become president until January 2009. This blames him for a year of Bush’s losses.

I could go on and on like this, but Matt O’Brien has already done the spadework. I actually can’t recall running into a piece in which the argument is so carefully written as to mislead the reader without, in most cases, being entirely untrue.

Matthew i The Atlantic är en annan som kritiserar Fergusson:

In the world as Ferguson describes it, Obama is a big-spending, weak-kneed liberal who can’t get the economy turned around. Think Jimmy Carter on steroids. But the world is not as Ferguson describes it. A fact-checked version of the world Ferguson describes reveals a completely different narrative — a muddy picture of the past four years, where Obama has sometimes cast himself as a stimulator, a deficit hawk, a health care liberal and conservative reformer all at once. And it’s a world where the economy is getting better, albeit slowly.

It would have been worthwhile for Ferguson to explain why Obama doesn’t deserve re-election in the real world we actually live in. Instead, we got an exercise in Ferguson’s specialty — counterfactual history.

Brad DeLong, ekonom vid Berkeley, skriver på sin blogg: More Lies from Niall Ferguson: Fire-His-Ass-Now Department skriver på sin blogg:

Now comes Ferguson to tell us that he lied.

Now comes Ferguson to tell us that his “But” at the start of the second sentence in the quote is completely, totally, and deliberately false.

Now comes Ferguson to tell us that he knows damned well that his “But” is a lie to his readers–that it is a false claim that Obama broke his pledge and that the rest of the second sentence will tell us how Obama broke his pledge.

Now comes Ferguson to tell us that he knows that Obama kept his pledge to pay for health care reform.

Now comes Ferguson to say that he put the $1.2 trillion number in the second sentence in the quote to make his readers believe something that was false–to keep them from knowing that the actual net budgetary effect of the ACA is to reduce the deficit by $134 billion and not increase it by $1.2 trillion.

And his only excuse–now, it’s not an excuse for the lie, it’s a “I can lie cleverly” boast–is: “I very deliberately said ‘the insurance coverage provisions of the ACA’, not ‘the ACA’”.

Fire his ass.
Fire his ass from Newsweek, and the Daily Beast.
Convene a committee at Harvard to examine whether he has the moral character to teach at a university.
There is a limit, somewhere. And Ferguson has gone beyond it.

En intressant debatt som visar hur välutbildade europeiska intellektuella kan göra bort sig i sina försök att ställa sig in hos de helt ointellektuella republikanerna.

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