Newsweek goes mad: Says "Obama?????s Gotta Go"

[_bcspace]

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/08/19/niall-ferguson-on-why-barack-obama-needs-to-go.html

[_Brackite]

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/08/19/niall-ferguson-on-why-barack-obama-needs-to-go.html

From That Article:

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.

[_Kevin Graham]

More false priests preaching the same lies to the same choir. Dailybeast? Really? How many times do we have to prove it is a useless source before you guys stop using it? It is meaningless unless you can convince the educated, and there is no evidence that you have. This is all about revving up the base, nothing more.

You guys keep deluding yourselves by focusing on these anti-Obama sources that do nothing but twist and lie. Check out Politifact's take on Obama's 500+ "promises." It determined that he has fulfilled 37% of them. 22% of them are in the works, and only 81, or 16% of them can be sad to be in any sense "broken promises." http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter ... /obameter/

This is actually astonishing given the unprecedented level of hostility this President has to face every day with this Tea Party congress.

Compare this to the Ryan led GOP's promises where only 19% of their promises have been kept. http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter ... e-o-meter/

[_Kevin Graham]

So you have idiots publishing ignorant opinion pieces like this and then you see economics call for his head for being deceptive and unethical. Gee, no surprise there.

Paul Krugman responded immediately:

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..."We’re not talking about ideology or even economic analysis here — just a plain misrepresentation of the facts, with an august publication letting itself be used to misinform readers. The Times would require an abject correction if something like that slipped through. Will Newsweek?"

Krugman and Ferguson have been bashing each other in public for years. Ferguson has been advocating austerity to prevent interest rates on government debt from rising. But Krugman has pointed out that interest rates on government debt are at historic lows.

Ferguson, a Harvard history professor and Newsweek columnist, wrote in the magazine's Aug. 27 cover story that Obama should lose the upcoming election because the president has broken his promises. Ferguson says Obama has not created enough jobs, fixed the financial system or controlled health care costs or the national debt.

He also wrote that in "Obama's America, nearly half the population is not represented on a taxable return. [...] half of us [are] paying the taxes, the other half receiving the benefits."

This is not exactly true. Although roughly half of Americans do not pay federal income taxes, most of them still pay some combination of payroll taxes, state taxes, local taxes and sales taxes, according to the Washington Post.

Ferguson's story also included a chart that seemed to blame Obama for letting the U.S. economy lose ground to China's. The chart shows China's GDP as projected to surpass U.S. GDP in 2017, a projection whose inclusion Business Insider's Joe Weisenthal and Slate's Matt Yglesias called unfair. Yglesias wrote: "Ferguson is implicitly making two points with this graphic and it's difficult to know which of them is more absurd -- the idea that Obama is responsible for rapid economic growth in China or the idea that if he were responsible that would be blameworthy."

UPDATE: 11:10 a.m. -- Ferguson fired back at Krugman in a Newsweek blog post on Monday. He took issue with Krugman for suggesting that he had not read the CBO report. Ferguson wrote that the CBO did say in its report that health care reform will cost the government money, which would be partially offset by taxes. "Thanks for trying, Paul," Ferguson wrote.

UPDATE: 11:48 a.m. -- Another noted economist has blasted Ferguson for his cover story, this time going further than Krugman by calling for Ferguson to get fired. Brad DeLong, economics professor at the University of California at Berkeley, wrote in a blog post on Monday:

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 just gone beyond it.

UPDATE: 12:56 p.m. -- Newsweek did not fact-check Ferguson's cover story, according to Dylan Byers, a media reporter at Politico. Byers wrote on Twitter that a Newsweek spokesman said the magazine does not have a fact-checking department, and that "we, like other news organisations today, rely on our writers to submit factually accurate material."

UPDATE: 1:25 p.m. -- Matt O'Brien, associate business editor at The Atlantic, wrote a stinging blog post fact-checking Ferguson's cover story, writing that "we got an exercise in Ferguson's specialty -- counterfactual history." Head over to The Atlantic for the full fact-check.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/2 ... 10136.html

[_Brackite]

You guys keep deluding yourselves by focusing on these anti-Obama sources that do nothing but twist and lie. Check out Politifact's take on Obama's 500+ "promises." It determined that he has fulfilled 37% of them. 22% of them are in the works, and only 81, or 16% of them can be sad to be in any sense "broken promises."

However, Barack Obama Broke one of his most important promises that he made in 2008. He Broke his promise of not raising taxes on anybody who makes under $250,000 a year when he signed the PPACA into law. Politifact.com even admitted to this.

We were willing to give President Barack Obama a Compromise rating on this promise when a new cigarette tax went into effect. But the latest health care bill includes more broad-based taxes that are pushing us toward Promise Broken.

We should state at the outset that if you think Obama only meant he would not raise income taxes on people making less than $250,000, then you might think Obama is keeping his promise. The Bush tax cuts expire at the end of 2010, and Obama said he would extend those tax cuts for those making less than $250,000. We still have that promise rated In the Works. People who make more than $250,000 will likely see their taxes go up, just as Obama promised during the campaign.

But Obama's campaign rhetoric took him beyond just income taxes. "Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes," Obama said. It's that "not any of your taxes" that is the sticking point.

The health care law that Obama signed on March 23, 2010, raises taxes on some things regardless of income. Two taxes in particular stand out. A tax on indoor tanning services begins this year. And in 2014, people will have to pay a fine, levied through their income taxes, if they don't have health insurance. Neither of these taxes are pegged to income.

Obama has made the case that the tax penalty for people who decline to buy insurance should not be considered a broken promise on taxes. If that tax, better known as the individual mandate, were the only new measure we were considering, we might be inclined to rate this a Compromise. But the fact is, if you're a happily uninsured smoker who likes to tan, you are facing a triple whammy.

Obama made many other tax promises that are rated In the Works, and may ultimately move to Promise Kept. But this promise was so broadly phrased that almost any type of revenue-generating measure could have contradicted it. We're now willing to rate it Promise Broken.

[_Drifting]

I think Ferguson has a personal axe to grind and isn't saying anything new...

In its 15 August 2005 edition, The New Republic published "The New New Deal", an essay by Ferguson and Laurence J. Kotlikoff, a Professor of Economics at Boston University. The two scholars called for the following changes to the American government's fiscal and income security policies:
Replacing the personal income tax, corporate income tax, Federal Insurance Contributions Act tax (FICA), estate tax, and gift tax with a 33% Federal Retail Sales Tax (FRST), plus a monthly rebate, amounting to the FRST a household with similar demographics would pay if its income were at the poverty line. See also: FairTax
Replacing the Old Age benefits paid under Social Security with a Personal Security System, consisting of private retirement accounts for all citizens, plus a government benefit payable to those whose savings were insufficient to afford a minimum retirement income
Replacing Medicare and Medicaid with a Medical Security System that would provide health insurance vouchers to all citizens, the value of which would be determined by one's health
Cutting federal discretionary spending by 20%

As Ferguson was saying this in 2005 (4 years before Obama took office) perhaps bcspace can explain why Mr Bush chose not to follow this advice?

[_krose]

But the fact is, if you're a happily uninsured smoker who likes to tan, you are facing a triple whammy.

Well, I guess he can kiss John Boehner's vote goodbye now, although I suspect John is pretty happy to have his socialist, government-run health care. But still, two out of three isn't bad.

I know "Snooki" was pretty upset about the tanning bed tax. Poor girl had to go spray-on for a while. As she so wisely put it, "McCain would never put a 10 percent tax on tanning, because he’s pale and would probably want to be tan. Obama doesn’t have that problem. Obviously."

Actually, I've never even heard of a happily uninsured person, although the way the right has been howling about a massive tax on the middle class, there must be millions of them. Still, I'm thinking anyone who can afford to self insure is definitely not "middle class." You could never manage that feat on $250K.

[_krose]

By the way, can you imagine the workload for anyone who will catalog the promises of a president Romney?

He's been pretty busy with the promises... unemployment down to 6%, embassy in Israel moved to Jerusalem, Iran not allowed to get nukes, 'holes in the safety net' repaired, a job for every college graduate, China slapped down and put in their place, health-care law repealed and "replaced" with something better, regulations removed, taxes lowered even more, military spending increased, Medicare and Social Security spending untouched, Medicare and Social Security "saved," deficit spending ended, budget balanced, millions of new jobs each quarter, and the beat goes on.

[_Doctor Steuss]

Newsweek explained to Politico's Dylan Byers that Newsweek "rel[ies] on our writers to submit factually accurate material." Indeed, Byers also noted that Newsweek does not even have a fact-checking department.

http://mediamatters.org/blog/2012/08/21/newsweek-niall-ferguson-and-the-conservative-ec/189481

[_Kevin Graham]

But the fact is, if you're a happily uninsured smoker who likes to tan, you are facing a triple whammy.

These are taxes on purchases, which means you're only taxed "extra" if you make such purchases. And since tanning and smoking isn't limited to folks making less than $250k/year, it boggles the mind how anyone could use this as an example of a "broken promise" when he was clearly speaking of taxes these folks making less than $250k would have no way of avoiding, such as income taxes. As it is, people can easily avoid these taxes by not buying tobacco or tanning services. If they absolutely have to smoke and be tan, they can just as easily switch to natural sunlight exposure and electronic cigarettes.

Brackite insists that this is a most important broken promise, but is it really? And to whom? The only people who care about this nonsense are the Grover Norquists of America who treat any taxation like the next step to a Fascist state. It is hardly a broken promise at all. In fact, politico has to do some mental gymnastics there to make it so.

Again, the examples these folks present from Obama as lies and broken promises, don't even begin to compare to the blatant lying going on by Romney and his campaign.

EDIT Update: Factcheck.org has a different take: http://www.factcheck.org/2012/05/a-bogu ... nst-obama/