By @robertwaldmann twitter-demand

I have a fan who refers to "your fans" in the apparent belief that he is not alone. He liked this comment on Brad's blog which I now make a post.

Will Wilkinson wrote

In my opinion, the seeming inevitability of Orszag-like migrations points to a potentially fatal tension within the progressive strand of liberal thought. Progressives laudably seek to oppose injustice by deploying government power as a countervailing force against the imagined opressive and exploitative tendencies of market institutions. Yet it seems that time and again market institutions find ways to use the government's regulatory and insurer-of-last-resort functions as countervailing forces against their competitors and, in the end, against the very public these functions were meant to protect.

We are constantly exploited by the tools meant to foil our exploitation. For a progressive to acknowledge as much is tantamount to abandoning progressivism. So it's no surprise that progressives would rather worry over trivialities such as campaign finance reform than dwell on the paradoxes of political power.

Jon Chait criticized Wilkinson

Will Wilkinson replied

JONATHAN CHAIT of the New Republic takes issue with some of the lessons I drew earlier this week in my post about Peter Orszag's trip through the Washington-Wall Street revolving door:

I don't think private capture of public functions represent a major, recurring problem with liberal governance. Does the minimum wage result in regulatory capture? Does Social Security? The Earned Income Tax Credit? Moreover, when such capture does occur, liberals can un-capture it, something that happened with student loans, Medicare Advantage, and so on. Libertarians are very interested in the phenomenon of regulations being turned into weapons of business power, but this phenomenon seems like the exception rather than the rule.

First, I should clarify that I did not mean to be pointing out a huge hole in the logic of liberal redistribution. Rather, I was pointing out a problem for the classical progressive idea of the regulatory state as a check on concentrated economic power. In any case, I must say I'm dazzled by the audacity of Mr Chait's claim that the "private capture of public functions" is rare.

Let me give two shorter excerpts of Wilkinson

"to acknowledge as much is tantamount to abandoning progressivism"

"I was pointing out a problem for the classical progressive idea"

Either admitting that an approach has any problems is tantamount to abandoning it, or Will Wilkonsin is lying about what he wrote.

My comment on Brad's blog follows.







Wilkinson and Chait are, among other things, arguing about the correct interpretation of something written by Wilkinson. I call that debate for Chait. Wilkinson's paraphrase of Wilkinson is innaccurate. Not to put too fine a point on it, Wilkinson has chosen to lie about what he wrote.

The key passage of Wilkinson's post is "For a progressive to acknowledge as much is tantamount to abandoning progressivism." Now he claims "Rather, I was pointing out a problem for the classical progressive idea "

BullSh*t. The fact that some approach must face some problems proves that we are on planet Earth. To aknowledge as much one does not need to abandone everything. Resistent bacteria are a problem for the physicians who rely on antibiotics. Is Wilkinson going to argue that we should abandone antibiotics ?

Wilkinson said that acknowledgement that regulatory capture is and always will be a problem implies abandonement of the classical progressive project. That's just as sane as my argument against antibiotics. If it has a problem abandone it is his implied logic.

He has conveniently forgotten about his stated conclusion.

Wilkinson also lied about what Chait wrote. Chait wrote "I don't think private capture of public functions represent a major, recurring problem with liberal governance." Wilkinson claims " Wilkinson wrote 'Mr Chait's claim that the "private capture of public functions' is rare."

Wilkinson is making it obvious. I'm sure there are cases in which an honest person has constructed a sentence partly by quoting and partly by rewriting. I can't think of any such case, but people have been writing for a long time. Wilkinson just decided to suppress the word "major". He must know that his use of quotation marks is fraudulent. He must understand that he is cheating. I don't think that he understands how gross this second lie is, because I don't think he is capable of grasping the concept "major." He shows no capability of understanding degrees, quantitative differences, anything between 0% and 100%.


Another point of contention is that Wilkinson was writing about "the classical progressive idea ..." that is thought from the progressive era. This is comprehensible from context, but Chait can't be blamed for assuming Wilkinson used "progressivism" the way everyone else has for decades.

Of course practically everyone who ever lived and breathed understands that regulatory capture is an inevitable problem with any regulation (including the regulations that establish the institution of private propertyvconclusion and pretends he just said that there is a problem. (Brad's implied claim that Marx's thought on the subject was original is absurd -- in this case, he like Wilkinson was pretended he had discovered something which was well known to all)).


Sane people do not therefore become anarchists or decide to eliminate private wealth completely. Insane people might become anarchists or, if they are insane and incapable of following their arguments to their conclusions libertarians or Christian Scientists or who knows what.

The worst problem with Wilkinson is not that he wrote something stupid (everyone does from time to time). It isn't even that, when challenged he lied about what he wrote. The problem is that he can't see any shade of grey.

His argument is that progressivism can't be perfect and that if progressives recognised this they would have to abandon progressivism. He can write such nonsense, because he thinks in false dichotomies. If money can be used to influence regulators, then regulators serve only money and all regulations become tools of concentrated interests. He does not recognise anything between no influence at all and total control.

This means that he doesn't notice that there is a difference between reducing the impact of a regulation and reversing the impact. Let's imagine a simple world with one variable x and a regulation which would cause x to increase by 10 if regulators were completely immune to any influence. But a few are bribed (not important) and many know about revolving doors and all that and as a result x increases only by 9. Wilkinson would claim that the proof of influence (such as Orszag's current employment) proves that the regulation caused x to decrease. Oh and that if he can think of 20 such cases then he can conclude that regulation always helps concentrated interests.

Of course people who control lots of money can influence other people (not quite all but many other people). This does not mean that regulations aiming to restrain business have the opposite of the intended effect.

Consider the example of financial regulation. Wilkinson is saying the classical progressives were wrong about regulation. If he really thought that, he would think that regulation should return to the way it was before the progressive era. His solution to the fact that Orszag's actions in office were problem influenced by the prospect of getting his current job if he didn't piss off Citibank managers is to eliminate financial regulation. We tried a little tiny bit of that and it didn't work.

He is almost completely indifferent to evidence and deeply profoundly innumerate (well that's shades of grey again).

Some of his claims about the freequency of regulatory capture --

"it seems that time and again ...."


"We are constantly exploited by the tools meant to foil our exploitation. "

A claim about what "seems" becomes an unqualified claim in the indicative. "Time and time again" becomes "constantly"

Now it becomes "... regulation is very, very, very often turned into (or originally fashioned) as a weapon of business power."

Wilkinson fails entirely to note that cases in which regulation is originally fashioned as a weapon of business power offer no him no support. That would be the law of intended effect. He is incapable of grasping the fact that progressives didn't create all regulations (he specifically cites regulation in the 1920s when progressives were all powerful as we know). But Wilkinson is a liberaltarian so he doesn't bother over the distinction between progressives, and Republicans. They all have something to do with government and Wilkinson imagines that, if he can prove that government is imperfect, he has proven that he is a genius and member of a tiny enlightened elite.

In the end, you can't be both a libertarian and a grownup.

Normally distributed asset returns and CARA utility make the mean variance approximation exact.

My correspondence

Dear Pro.Waldmann

I'm a [university name redacted] PhD student who is interested in your paper "Noise Trader Risk in Financial Markets" in 1990 (The journal of Political Economy,Vol98, No.4, P703-738). It's really a good early paper which theoreticaly brings noise traders' activities into the cause of price changes. However I was stopped at a simple beginning step when I tried to understand every detail of this paper. In page 708 there is a explanation for the utility maximization. "With normally distrituted returns to holding a unit of the risky asset, maximizing the expected value of (2) is equivalent to maximizing (3)".
I was stopped here, because I tried to prove this equivalence algebraically but failed to do so. I was wondering if there is a mathmetical method to prove that maximizing the exponential utility function equals to maximizing the function (3)?

Maybe it is a stupid question which is very simple to answer, but I will really appreciate your guidance. Thanks for your time and I'm sorry to trouble you.

Best wishes
Yours sincerely
[name redacted ]

I reply below. This is how I reply to correspondence about math. I don't know if that is a threat or a promise. Look below to decide for yourselves.


It is an intelligent question. I don't know a reference for the proof.
The mathematical result is that if x is normally distributed with mean m and variance s^2 ( s squared) then
E(-exp(lambda*x)) = -exp[-lambda*(m - (lambda/2)s^2)]

(* means times, exp() meand e to the () ^ means to the so ^2 means squared )

the function f(a) = -exp(-lambda*a) is monotonically increasing. Its derivative is lambda*exp(lambda*a) > 0 for any a. So maximizing
-exp[-lambda*(m - (lambda/2)s^2)] is just the same thing as maximizing m - (lambda/2)s^2.

The key step is
E(-exp(lambda*x)) = -exp[-lambda*(m - (lambda/2)s^2)]

This is just an integral (hard to type with plain ascii)

if x is normally distributed the expected value is
the integral from - infinity to infinity of
- exp(lambda*x) (1/(s*(2*pi)^0.5)) exp(-(x-m)^2/s^2)=

the integral from - infinity to infinity of
-(1/(s*(2*pi)^0.5)) exp(-lambda*x -(x-m)^2/(2s^2)) =


the integral from - infinity to infinity of -(1/(s*(2*pi)^0.5))exp(-lambda*x -(x^2-2mx + m^2)/(2s^2)) =

the integral from - infinity to infinity of -(1/(s*(2*pi)^0.5))exp(-lambda*x -(x^2-2mx + m^2)/s^2) =

the integral from - infinity to infinity of -(1/(s*(2*pi)^0.5))exp(-lambda*x +(-x^2 + 2mx - m^2)/(2s^2)) =

the integral from - infinity to infinity of -(1/(s*(2*pi)^0.5))exp((-x^2 + 2mx-2lambda*(s^2)x - m^2)/(2s^2))

OK now complete the square so =

the integral from - infinity to infinity of -(1/(s*(2*pi)^0.5))exp((-(x - (m-lambda*(s^2)))^2 + m^2 + 2m*lambda*s^2 - lambda^2(s^4) - m^2)/(2s^2))

Sorry about that but it is just algebra -- completing a square. If I typed correctly it works fine.

this equals

the integral from - infinity to infinity of (1/(s*(2*pi)^0.5))exp(-(x - (m-lambda*(s^2)))^2/(2s^2)) *
(-exp(-(2m*lambda*s^2 - lambda^2(s^4) )/(2s^2)))

OK the term exp(-(2m*lambda*s^2 - lambda^2(s^4) )/(2s^2)) is a constant and can be taken out of the integral so this =

-exp(-(2m*lambda*s^2 - lambda^2(s^4) )/(2s^2)) *
the integral from - infinity to infinity of (1/(s*(2*pi)^0.5))exp(-(x - (m-lambda*(s^2)))^2/(2s^2))

The integral is just the integral from - infinity to infinity of a normal density with mean m - lambda*(s^2) and variance s^2 so it equals one so the whole mess is eqaul to

-exp(-(2m*lambda*s^2 - lambda^2(s^4) )/(2s^2))

or dividing
-exp(-(lambda*m - (lambda^2/2)s^2)
=

-exp(-lambda(*m - (lambda/2)s^2))

as asserted.

Ok a lot of algebra but basically just an integral, complete the square, take a constant out of the integration -- hey that integral is the probability that a randome variable is greater than - infinity and less than infinity so it's one.

I had fun typing this.
I hope it is useful.

Matthew Yglesias writes

Ragu Rajan ... his explanation of why economists didn’t predict the crisis:

I would argue that three factors largely explain our collective failure: specialization, the difficulty of forecasting, and the disengagement of much of the profession from the real world.

Rajan glosses a leading alternative hypothesis thusly:

Finally, an answer that is gaining ground is that the system bribed economists to stay silent.

Obviously bribe-based theories of human behavior are crude and rarely capture reality. But how about translating this into economics? How about incentives? Rajan says it’s not individual corruption that led to a lack of insight, it’s structure features of the way the profession is organized. That makes a lot of sense to me. But what explains that structural organization? Is it really unrelated to the financial basis of the economics profession? Or are economists supposed to be immune from the factors that influence human behavior in other instances?

I comment.


I will try to guess if the system is bribed to stay silent. I am technically an economist, but not part of the system (that is not an elite economist). To start with my conclusion, I don't think that the blindness of elite economists can be explained as a rational or semi rational response to incentives. I think that Rajan happens to be right about what went wrong.

Very few economists saw it coming (and they might have just guessed right or strategically made an extreme prediction which is like buying a lottery ticket). I'd say two things blinded economists, the EMH and DSGE (acronyms explained below). Neither was paid for by firms or rich individuals.

First the Efficient Markets Hypothesis (EMH) which holds that all assets always sell for the same price they would have if everyone had rational expectations. Basically it says there are no bubbles even in housing *and* that if there is a housing bubble then mortgage bonds and CDOs of mortgage bonds and CDSs on CDOs of morgage bonds are all correctly prices. Clearly no advocate of the EMH could see it coming.

For some reason, the EMH remains the default position of many academic economists. Worse, one exception at a time is allowed, so people see if one asset is correctly priced assuming all other assets are correctly priced. There is no way this approach could lead to a prediction that the recent crisis was even possible.

Also, iit would be a total catastrophic disaster for the financial services industry if the general investing public believed the EMH. If anyone took it seriously when investing (as opposed to when writing academic articles) then the financial services industry couldn't make much money dealing with that person. If one believes in the EMH and doesn't have private information (not a strategy or algorithm or theory but knowledge of relevant facts which almost no one knows) then one should buy and hold the market portfolio. This means low trading volume and low fees. This means you buy equal amounts of all tranches of CDOs (except you already have the pool of underlying assets so you don't bother). This means you don't pay someone to manage your money unless that person has private information.

The Financial services Industry makes its huge profits at the expense of suckers who think they can beat the market. Partly by charging them fees and partly by betting against them (since the EMH is false financial professionals can make money with simple rules). Belief in the EMH would kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

Yet academic economists have been promoting the EMH for decades. This just couldn't be the effect of being bribed *or* of some indirect influence of group interests on sincere beliefs or anything. The bought off hypothesis just doesn't fit the facts.

The use of DSGE (dynamic stochastic general equilibrium) models also guarantees failure to see it coming. It also has nothing to do with consulting. There is a sharp devision between academic macroeconomics and macroeconomic forecasting. It is done by different people. Some people are paid for forecasts. Clearly they have all sorts of interesting incentives which have been analysed at gruesome length by academic economists who, contra Yglesias, pay attention to incentives of forecasters. They don't use DSGE models. They missed it too, but they aren't the people Rajan was writing about. As far as I know, there is no rich or concentrated group which promotes DSGE models. People who pay macroeconomists pay completely different macroeconomists who do completely different things. They don't know or care what DSGE stands for.

I may be overstating my claim. It may be that DSGE models tweaked to give the same forecasts as atheoretic models are used. But no one has an interest in paying the middle man (the tweaked theory).

I'd say the way in which money has influence economics is by promoting in general a right wing slant (compared to view best supported by the evidence). Many prominent economists are very right wing. If asked, they advise people to vote for Republicans. Now I note that US economists are on average a bit to the left of the US center (the general academic thing beats the field specific thing). My view that the profession is slanted right compared to the evidence just means I am to the left of most of the profession.

In any case this has almost nothing to do with missing the warning signs.

Matthew Yglesias Argues against Direct election of Presidents and for a Parliamentary system

The problem with a strong president, especially in a country that doesn’t have a stable tradition of political parties or peaceful transfers of power, is that there can only be one. The whole country is plunged into a winner-take-all political contest. If the winner turns out to be someone with a “one man, one vote, one time” concept of democracy, then that’s all she wrote.

I comment

I add the proviso that you want either some kind of proportional representation (with a cutoff at 5% or 10% not 20%) or, shudder, a senate.

The English are quite proud of the unwritten constitution (writing it down is sooooo nouveau riche). However, they admit that it pretty much amounts to an electoral dictatorship.

If you have a disciplined party with an absolute majority in the one real houes of Parliament, then you are most of the way there to a dictatorship.

I live in Italy. Silvio Berlusconi avoids conviction for his many crimes, because he can change the law so that his acts, which were crimes at the time, are no longer crimes. Makes me long for the filibuster. Well not really, but Italy doesn't effectively have the rule of law (it is really irritating when a lawyer makes an argument to a judge that the law should be interpreted one way, the judge says know then the lawyer puts on his other hat as chairman of the justice committee of the lower house and writes a law which says, in effect, the old law is to be interpreted the way I said and is not to be intrepreted the way the judge intepreted it -- I am describing actual events). This would not be possible in the USA.

In constrast if you have a unicameral congress with many parties, the President has to negotiate.

Looking at non dictatorships, Jamaica was in a bit of a spot both when the Jamaica Labour Party (obviously pro-market right) won all but seven seats in one election and then all of all of them the next because the PUP boycotted the election.

In contrast Lula da Silva has been in an Obamalike position of being no threat to anything (not that he would be anyway) because the Workers party has never had a working majority in parliament. So he has to deal. Which means deal with crooks. Which means pay bribes.

Egypt is not currently a failed Democracy. They never tried. It was a dictatorship with window dressing.

Interestingly Democratic forces in Brazil and S Korea insisted very hard for a Presidential system. A gradual transition from military rule makes it very easy for members of the show parliament who are friendly with the generals to win, because they have been bringing home the bacon.

Finally I might add that the terrible power of Dmitri Medvedev isn't the worst problem with Russian Democracy. That winner sure didn't take all. To me, Putin seems just as much a dictator as prime minister as he did as president.

What is Bing doing with Google ?

Shane Greenstein provides a very clear explanation and critique.

I comment.

I was interested in finding out what I am telling Microsoft. In options, I don't see an option to not send any information (why am I not surprised).

So I went to
http://windows.microsoft.com/it-IT/windows-vista/windows-vista-privacy-statement

which tells me that if I want to learn about privacy and specific applications, I should click on the list to the right of the page.

This works for Windows Update, Windows Media center and the tell them about errors (Internet explorer communicates with me in Italian). However when I click on the button labled "internet explorer" it sends me right back to

http://windows.microsoft.com/it-IT/windows-vista/windows-vista-privacy-statement

Odd that Microsoft isn't telling me about internet explorer and privacy just now no ?

Just for information, is it possible to use internet explorer without sending microsoft information or was I warned long long ago when I installed it that this was part of the game. Can I use internet explorer without sending them information by re-installing and checking a box that says no ?

I notice that if I turn on the anti-pishing filter then internet explorer warns me that I will send information to Microsoft, and when I turn it off, there is no message -- neither "Now you aren't sending us information" nor "You are still sending us information."

The reader will notice that I am not very web savvy and I am humbly asking for help.

Here's another one on utilitarianism and hypocrisy

Sometimes I am a utilitarian. Usually I am some sort of consequentialist with some belief in some sorts of rights which are trumps (I am a Utilitarian about as often as I bid no-trumps).

I never act according to my moral principles. I never have and I doubt I ever will.

I can accept sub-optimal Democratically enacted laws all I want, but I can't find anything in the laws of Italy (where I live) or the USA (where I was born) which forbids me to give all I can to the poor. I am quite sure that to maximize utils and to contribute the fullest flowering of the human condition, I ought to give away most of my income (not all -- a Robert who starved to death is no good for the poor). Oh and I should work real hard to maximise my income to give them more, unless I can think of anything more useful to do with my time (trying real hard and failing). I sure don't do that. I consume about 99% of my potential income in Leisure.

I guess Brad knows this as he switched his appeal to Jefferson after finding that Bentham provided no effective defence for Milton Friedman or uhm now that you mention it, Brad DeLong.

More from DeLong on Hypocrisy. Recall I will use his content fairly if and when his blog stops eating my comments.

Update: It didn't eat one which I thought was eaten so fair use is now a link.

In summary, Brad accused Karl Marx, Robert Nozick, Robert Bork and Ayn Rand of hypocisy but said that Milton Friedman was not a hypocrite. The new point is that if you accept Democracy you can benefit from priviledges you oppose (and voted against) without being a hypocrite.


Comment.

In an attempted comment, I defended Nozick. IIRC Nozick didn't say anything about his moral beliefs in "Anarchy State and Utopia." He consistently ascribed the view that the free market distribution was the one and only just and fair distribution to Friedrich von Hayek and said no more than that it was logically consistent. He noted that egalitarianism requires continual governement intervention (eg an income tax) and that a one off land reform won't do the trick (knock me over with a wrecking ball). I think he played his cards so close to the chest that he ran no risk of ordinary hypocrisy -- he confessed no beliefs about right and wrong.

I now defend Rand. I haven't read anything she wrote and don't plan to do so. I understand that she advocated selfishness. Taking Medicare was selfish. She seems to have been true toer her principle. The observation that most people are parasites might be construed as an expression of disapproval. However, that means she had a confused moral doctrine with two aspects -- be selfish and not if you aren't John Galt. It seems to me that someone who's views of morality are so depraved just couldn't manage hypocrisy. She couldn't be worse than she claimed to be.

On Marx, see below. I think he managed to stick to the sham that he was a positive social scientist enough to hide his views on morality and avoid ordinary hypocrisy (via higher level hypocrisy of denying he ever perceived the moral laws that he perceived and disobeyed). Also, I don't recall anything in Marx which amounts to rejection of Democracy. IIRC Lenin was a different person who lived later.

Comments on Brad's comment eating horror of a blog

update: the comment below appears on Brad's blog. It hadn't appeared when I checked. I rend my garments (ok so I am wearing already torn garments to blog but I rend them further).

Sorry Brad. My mistake.

Title for this post is[ NOT] a quotation of eminent journalist Jonathan Weisman.

By the way Brad, if you invite me to DropBox then all will be forgiven.
update: I now have drop box

I am reproducing this from memory as I stupidly hit post on his stupid comment eating blog. I reproduce the post in full below my comment. I'll use content fairly when the blog stops eating my comments. Brief summary -- Isaac Hall explains clearly and without bitterness how "dropbox" kicked the ass of his competing product syncplicity.

The point of the explanations is that DropBox's extreme limitations are a feature not a bug. Most people aren't computer geeks. Giving us dozens of options just confuses us. We need focus, we need direction, we can't have it and play with the web, but at least each webService should help us focus while we are wasting time with it.

I add (not from memory) that with all the competing webproducts it is hubristic to try to be the only one people use by including all the other web services as features. We don't want more different ways to Skype or Facebook. There are already too many ways. Note the astonishing accomplishment of Microsoft achieved by applying their engulf and devour strategy to the web.

The example also shows that the struggle for clicks is fierce beyond Darwin's worst nightmare. Everyone uses what everyone uses (that's why modern English -- 946 years in developement and still full of bugs (I was tempted to type stil ful of bugs (or rather "tipe "stil ful of bugs" (the worst of which is that it doesn't accept nested parentheses))) and without a word wide standard causing much wasted labor AKA labour -- rules the world currently via English.aljazeera.net).

By the Way, Hall's RI (reader interface) would be improved if he used fewer acronyms. I figured out that UI doesn't stand for Un-necessary_strain_on_my Intelligence but user interface, but what the hell is RTFM ? I guess Real Time Frequency Modulation or maybe Really Torturous File Management.

You want to sell to the masses, then speak like the masses, in Inglish.

Fair use is a link to click to go to the post on Brad's comment presenting blog.

You can also see the comment which wasn't sent to cyberlivion and compare it to my effort to reproduce it from memory.

Attempted DeLong Smackdown

I can't stand it. english.aljazeera.net streaming video (find the link yourself you competitor for band width) is overloaded. Brad DeLong's blog is still eating my comments. I am so desperate for something to do that I might actually do some work.

But first I will make this blog the Brad's blog devoured comments blog.

Also f**k fair use. I will start using your copy fairly when you stop eating my comments.

update: Some have appeared so I am fairusing. Quote becomes a link.

Brad says Marx was a hypocrite because he said workers were exploited and benefited from that exploitation. Dsquared says Marx did not believe in objective moral law and didn't say that exploitation was morally wrong.


I comment.


Minds think alike. I almost commented that the real hypocrisy was sponging off capitalist exploiter Friedrich Engels.

I now attempt to answer to your question of how can pseudo_Marx value neutral social scientist argue that they system must be changed. Pseudo_Marx simply asserted that the system, like it or not, was doomed. He said that change was inevitable. His normative claim was just that everyone would be better off if we made the inevitable transition to socialism sooner.

You object to Marx using the value laden term "exploitation" yet you sneak the value laden term "peaceful" into your proposed alternative approach. You present no argument that Marx new or could have known that the inevitable historical change could possibly be peaceful. What gave you the right to slip the word peaceful in ? You can't appeal to 20th century history without asserting that Marx was obviously precognitive.

Also, since when was Marx an opponent of peaceful change ? He pretty definitely said in so many words that the US constitution was fine (also I think the Swiss one and he admitted he knew too little about the Dutch constitution to judge).

He objected to limited suffrage (what a blood thirsty monster). He predicted that opponents of socialism would use violent means (to me,sitting in the outskirts of the Rome on which Mussolini marched, he seems to have had a point). He didn't advocate introducing violence to a democratic polity wiht universal suffrage (at least not in publications after the Address to the Communist League).

Of course the real live Marx morally condemned people for doing what he did. But his hypocrisy was of the form of claiming he was a value neutral social scientist. It was much deeper than confessing to his moral values and not behaving according to them.

However, he almost never let the mask slip. Look statisticians use the value laden term "bias" but that doesn't make them moralists. How about "fair market value" ? Sure seems to assert that capitalism can be fair. Jargon is often based on ordinary language, but technical terms don't prove that the person using them appeals to all the connotations of the term. Note the key word "proves." I have no doubt that the really existing Karl Marx was a moralist and a hypocrite. I just don't see the proof in your post.

I am not familiar with the writings of this Rand person of which you speak, but it seems to me that the founder of "objectivism" shared the deeper hypocrisy with Marx as well as the minor laps from the un-confessed views of morality.

Coner Friedersdorf - 3 = a banana

Always click the link -- K Drum

Fridersdorf wrote "In 2008, 59,934,814 Americans voted for John McCain. During election week, Fox News as a network averaged 3.54 million viewers. (Perhaps liberals would have more success trying to persuade the other 56,394,814 Republican voters.) " Evidently he assumes that all Fox viewers vote Republican. Good to know.

However, he has no clue about this new concept called "arithmetic." He clearly has no idea what the word "averaged" means. The number of people who viewed Fox that week is not an average.

I clicked the link which he provided and read

"Fox News' primetime lineup for Tuesday, January 19, accounted for three of ad-supported cable's 10 most-watched programs, as "The O'Reilly Factor" drew 5.23 million viewers at 8 p.m., followed by "Hannity" (6.81 million) and "On the Record with Greta van Susteren" (6.4 million)."

So at the very very least 6.81 million people watched Fox that week. In fact on the Tuesday of that week. Of course not every single person who watched Fox that day watched Hannity that night. And not every person who watched Fox that week watched on Tuesday.

If Mr Friedersdorf took a refresher course on arithmetic, he might not make a total fool of himself.

59,934,814 Americans minus 3.54 viewers on average is not a number of Americans or an average number of viewers. the number 56,394,814 carefully typed out by Mr Friedersdorf does not enumerate anything at all. He is not capable of handling numbers. The concept is too subtle for him.

I am absolutely serious and think I am being absolutely fair to Conor Friedersdorf.

The effort at subtraction demonstrates that Friedersdorf doesn't understand the concept of subtraction.


update: I'm not sure I made it clear just how totally utterly nonsensical Friedersdorf's argument is. The main point isn't that the maximum number of people viewing Fox news is greater than the average, but that the total number of people who view Fox news is much greater than the number viewing at a given time.

Consider a Pew survey aiming at measuring public knowledge. Pew reported "Other television sources were also popular, with somewhat fewer than half watching network evening news (46%), the Fox News Channel (43%), and CNN (39%). " in a "Pew Research Center survey that interviewed a representative national sample of 1,502 adults between Feb.1-13, 2007." So 43% of adults claim to watch Fox News. I'll give you a hint, 3.54 million is not 43% of the number of adults in the USA.

Now Friedersdorf might argue that watching Fox news for one hour probably doesn't have a big effect. That is, he might choose to change the subject, because arithmetic is too hard for him to handle.

However, there can be no doubt that he can't manage arithmetic.

Duncan Black made me angry. So angry I defended Joe Klein. I may forgive but I will never forget this.

He wrote

Having not lived through the 60s this is something I only sort of understand, but there is a segment of white male "liberal" technocrats of a certain age who thought they were remaking the country into a "liberal" utopia, which may or may not have included women, and all was going swimmingly until dirty hippies and black radicals screwed the whole thing up. That maybe white male liberal technocratic quiet Americans probably fucked the whole thing up by embarking on our grand Vietnam adventure, or that there are any parallels to today, never occurs to them.

Also, angry bloggers.


-Atrios 13:39

It's hard to be unfair to Joe Klein, but you may have managed. I don't think the liberal technorats failed to notice the war in Vietnam. The claim that radicals ruined everything is quite widespread among people who didn't go along with the older generation technocrats which screwed everything up. I have a friend who has very harsh things to say about some radicals at Harvard in 1970 and he was arrested occupying university hall in 1970 at Harvard. He hasn't changed his views. I think he'd do it again. But don't get him started on the progressive labor party.

Look it absolutely isn't just liberal technocrats. It is voters by the millions. Do you think that Bush would have won in 2004 if Jane Fonda had stuck to acting ? I don't.

That's a guess. However, the idea that liberal technocrats of Klein's age think that Kennedy and McNamara were just fine and dandy is nonsense. One could be a ruthless critic of the then Democratic party (not just dixiecrats the mainstream) without being one of the idiot radicals who went too far and damaged the left.

Are you going to tell me that Nixon would have won without the violence in Chicago (in which the police were guilty but the protesters might have strategically decided to give Humphrey a chance). Look at the vote totals.

Now you might consider it no big deal that Nixon was elected President, but people who were alive at the time can just tell you to learn some history and grow up or shut up.

Also the word "Negro" is absurd in contrast. The Negroes won the admiration of the US and the world (try to check how many times King used the word). The Blacks who assault people on TV when those people call them "Negro" didn't contribute too much. I am referring to Roy Innis (on the Geraldo show) who somehow gained control of CORE. Do you have no problem with Roy Innis ?

It was long ago, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen.

I hasten to add that I don't use the word Negro to refer to Blacks or African Americans.

Look if you don't want to refight the 60s then don't fucking mention them. If you choose to open the debate don't be upset if people who aren't totally fucking ignorant as you are point out that you don't have a fucking clue.

By the way I was 9 on December 31 1969 and if I fucking understand then the smug arrogant ignorant Atrios has no fucking excuse to be such a twit.

Brad's blog is still eating my comments

update: This comment appeared on Brad's blog. My mistake.

He attempts to discuss the ACA and Medicare actuary Richard Foster but he's confused. He wrote


"To say that the Affordable Care Act will in the end not reduce costs because doctors will successfully lobby Congress to repeal some of its provisions ... "

Wrong Brad wrong in an important way. The provisions in question apply to Medicare plan A (hospitals, nursing homes and home health care agencies) not to Doctors as such including Doctors with office practices (Medicare plan B). Given the ability of Doctors to get doc fixes once a year, there would be reason to worry if the ACA included attempts to squeeze doctors with office practices.

Such doctors can't be squeezed as many already refuse to deal with the CMS. However, hospitals don't refuse (I googled for half an hour for hospital refuses medicare in all permutations I could think of without finding an example in the past 10 years). The ACA squeezes those that can be squeezed not those who can't be.

There are doctors with over busy office practices which have to turn patients away. There aren't such hospitals (in any case there aren't two of them). This makes a huge difference.

The report, which was heavily shaped by the commission’s chairman, Phil Angelides, is dotted with literary flourishes. It calls credit-rating agencies “cogs in the wheel of financial destruction.” Paraphrasing Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” it states, “The fault lies not in the stars, but in us.”

paraphrasing Pogo: we have met our enemy and he is ourselves.

Via Tintin wins

Totally fabulous und wunderbar.

Duncan Black's Memory

hole.

Brad DeLong confesses, among other things,

"1. I thought that the highly leveraged banks had control over their risks. [skip]"

Duncan Black claims to have known better than DeLong

"I certainly didn't believe in #s 1, 3, or 5, though I probably thought them to be more true than I do now."


However Black has admitted that he believed number 1. He has forgotten that past belief and the confession. I was googling for a post which I vaguely remembered and didn't find it but I did find this

"I didn't know that financial institutions were making such leveraged bets on big shitpile."

I had given up on googling then had the idea of including "didn't know" in the search that narrowed things down to 36 hits as Dr Black uses the phrase very rarely.

I am having some fun (for myself and no one else I guess) at his expense, but I must note that I found searching his years old archives time consuming, because I kept learning things I didn't know before. for example.

libel in the New York Times and Reuters

Peter Baker wrote

One day he derided “fat-cat bankers” who caused the recession; another day, he soothed them by saying that he and the American people “don’t begrudge” multimillion-dollar bonuses.

I know that Barack Obama said that Lloyd Blankfein invented the internet, but the claim "he soothed them by saying that he and the American people 'don’t begrudge' multimillion-dollar bonuses." is false. Since it is a false claim about a published transcript, the false claim published in the New York Times demonstrates reckless disregard for the truth.

I quote the context of the two words TWO Words ! which Baker ripped out of context.

http://tinyurl.com/6jdgbfg


"Q Let's talk bonuses for a minute: Lloyd Blankfein, $9 million; Jamie Dimon, $17 million. Now, granted, those were in stock and less than what some had expected. But are those numbers okay?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, look, first of all, I know both those guys. They're very savvy businessmen. And I, like most of the American people, don't begrudge people success or wealth. That's part of the free market system. I do think that the compensation packages that we've seen over the last decade at least have not matched up always to performance. I think that shareholders oftentimes have not had any significant say in the pay structures for CEOs."

So Obama said that the US people don't begrudge success or wealth as such, however, wealth based on Wall Street compenstation packages have no justification.

Just to make it absolutely clear that Baker libeled Obama, I will also report the follow up question and answer

"Q Seventeen million dollars is a lot for Main Street to stomach.

THE PRESIDENT: Listen, $17 million is an extraordinary amount of money. Of course, there are some baseball players who are making more than that who don't get to the World Series either. So I'm shocked by that as well. I guess the main principle we want to promote is a simple principle of "say on pay," that shareholders have a chance to actually scrutinize what CEOs are getting paid. And I think that serves as a restraint and helps align performance with pay. The other thing we do think is the more that pay comes in the form of stock that requires proven performance over a certain period of time as opposed to quarterly earnings is a fairer way of measuring CEOs' success and ultimately will make the performance of American businesses better."

So in exactly the interview which Baker falsely asserts shows Obama soothing Wall Street executives, he advocated regulation of compensation which were not approved by Congress.

The claim about Obama is exactly as valid as the claim that "Al Gore claimed he invented the internet."

Felix Salmon quotes the false butchered two words of quotation plus an innaccurate paraphrase without noting the error.

Water is wet. The Pope is Catholic and Richard Cheney Lies

According to former Vice President Dick Cheney, President Obama has “learned from experience” that Bush administration terror policies were necessary and correct, pointing to increased drone strikes by the Obama administration and a failure to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay. “I think he’s learned that what we did was far more appropriate than he ever gave us credit for while he was a candidate,” Cheney said.

Yep Obama has decided not to close the prison in Guantanamo Bay. It has nothing to do with the decision by Congress, which he denounced, to refuse to pay for closing the prison. He just changed his mind and is only pretending that he would close the prison if Congress let him. Of course Cheney probably genuinely doesn't believe that a President actually feels bound to obey the Constitution. In fact the thought probably didn't cross his mind.

However, his first lie is more striking. Yep candidate Obama didn't advocate increased drone strikes, especially not when he wrote "I will not hesitate to use military force to take out terrorists ...". As I recall, that enthusiasm for Drone strikes was denounced by John McCain who had some trouble explaining why he supported actual drone strikes, later, when the Bush administration did what candidate Obama said he wouldn't hesitate to do.

I wouldn't be surprised if the drone strikes in Pakistan had started earlier and just weren't reported yet. I'm not arguing that the Bush administration slowly learned from experience that candidate Obama's proposal was far more appropriate than McCain gave him credit for. I don't make silly absurd plainly false claims. I am not Richard Cheney.

Matthew Ygelesias is soft on Classical Liberalism

Today he wrote both

"I recognize that many people disagree with this agenda, and that many of those who disagree with it think of themselves as “to the left” of my view. But I simply deny that there are positions that are more genuinely egalitarian than my own."

and

"I’d say it’s liberalism, a view recognizably derived from the thinking of JS Mill and Pigou and Keynes and Maury “Freedom Plus Groceries” Maverick and all the rest."

I understand that "derived" is the 600 pound weasel which can make any argument valid, but I don't think that Yglesias has read Mill recently and/or completely.
Many of Mill's views were so far right that no US elected official defends them anymore (I believe that David Duke still holds elective office). I commented off the top of my head, then checked my memories which were not exact mainly because I thought I had read stuff from "Reflections on Representative Governement" in "On Liberty."

My comment

I ... think you slipped up in your reply. You say no one is to your left and your thought is based on the thought of JD Mill. This does not imply that no one is to the left of JS Mill, but it totally miss states where Mill's writings would place him if he were reincarnated. Many of his views would be ultra ultra right today. For example, he supported a poll tax on the grounds that to be able to vote on spending without being taxed is to be given a license to pick other peoples' pockets (I am quoting "On Liberty" from memory). Margaret Thatcher decieded to follow the very explicit detailed instructions of JS Mill. That was the time she went too far and lost the confidence of the Tory Parliamentary party and so the parliament and so became a baroness. Too far right for Margeret Thatcher to get away with and very explicitly advocated by JS Mill are consistent.

update: I added this quote after posting my comment

"Those who pay no taxes, disposing by their votes of other people's money, have every motive to be lavish and none to economize. As far as money matters are concerned, any power of voting possessed by them is a violation of the fundamental principle of free government, a severance of the power of control from the interest in its beneficial exercise. It amounts to allowing them to put their hands into other people's pockets for any purpose which they think fit to call a public one, which, in the great towns of the United States, is known to have produced a scale of local taxation onerous beyond example, and wholly borne by the wealthier classes. That representation should be coextensive with taxation, not stopping short of it, but also not going beyond it, is in accordance with the theory of British institutions. But to reconcile this, as a condition annexed to the representation, with universality, it is essential, as it is on many other accounts desirable, that taxation, in a visible shape, should descend to the poorest class. In this country, and in most others, there is probably no laboring family which does not contribute to the indirect taxes, by the purchase of tea, coffee, sugar, not to mention narcotics or stimulants. But this mode of defraying a share of the public expenses is hardly felt: the payer, unless a person of education and reflection, does not identify his interest with a low scale of public expenditure as closely as when money for its support is demanded directly from himself; and even supposing him to do so, he would doubtless take care that, however lavish an expenditure he might, by his vote, assist in imposing upon the government, it should not be defrayed by any additional taxes on the articles which he himself consumes. It would be better that a direct tax, in the simple form of a capitation, should be levied on every grown person in the community; or that every such person should be admitted an elector on allowing himself to be rated extra ordinem to the assessed taxes; or that a small annual payment, rising and falling with the gross expenditure of the country, should be required from every registered elector, that so every one might feel that the money which he assisted in voting was partly his own, and that he was interested in keeping down its amount."

Mill's proposal is explicitly forbidden by the
He also opposed the secret ballot. He said that, in the past, he supported it so people couldn't be intimidated by their employers, but that people were getting too uppity so open voting was better. The excessive uppityness was in the 19th century. This again is very very explicitly stated in "On Liberty".

Oh Nemisis. I decided to check my recollections and it is very explicitly state in "Reflections of Represenative Government" a book which I must have read but I don't remember when. I quote one of the inspirations of your insuperable leftism
http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/... (search for ballot)

It may unquestionably be the fact, that if we attempt, by publicity, to make the voter responsible to the public for his vote, he will practically be made responsible for it to some powerful individual, whose interest is more opposed to the general interest of the community than that of the voter himself would be, if, by the shield of secrecy, he were released from responsibility altogether. When this is the condition, in a high degree, of a large proportion of the voters, the ballot may be the smaller evil.

[skip]

But in the more advanced states of modern Europe, and especially in this country, the power of coercing voters has declined and is declining; and bad voting is now less to be apprehended from the influences to which the voter is subject at the hands of others, than from the sinister interests and discreditable feelings which belong to himself, either individually or as a member of a class.


Finally he opposed one person one vote. He thought people with advanced degrees should have extra votes. He said this would make it clear that they were (we are) the "very elite" of the nation. He objected that ordinary people in the USA "(provided they are white)" do not acknoweldge that anyone is their better.

nemesis again. Again it is in Reflections on Representative Govenment and the attempted quote is not correct. This time search for "white skin"

"I do not look upon equal voting as among the things which are good in themselves, provided they can be guarded against inconveniences. I look upon it as only relatively good; less objectionable than inequality of privilege grounded on irrelevant or adventitious circumstances, but in principle wrong, because recognizing a wrong standard, and exercising a bad influence on the voter's mind. It is not useful, but hurtful, that the constitution of the country should declare ignorance to be entitled to as much political power as knowledge. The national institutions should place all things that they are concerned with before the mind of the citizen in the light in which it is for his good that he should regard them; and as it is for his good that he should think that every one is entitled to some influence, but the better and wiser to more than others, it is important that this conviction should be professed by the state, and embodied in the national institutions. Such things constitute the spirit of the institutions of a country;
[skip]
The American institutions have imprinted strongly on the American mind that any one man (with a white skin) is as good as any other; and it is felt that this false creed is nearly connected with some of the more unfavorable points in American character. It is not small mischief that the constitution of any country should sanction this creed; for the belief in it, whether express or tacit, is almost as detrimental to moral and intellectual excellence any effect which most forms of government can produce. "

Mill wrote a long time ago. His views were very progressive in his time, but many of them are absurdly reactionary now.

Your efforts to reassure your readers that you are a leftist just like Milton Friedman and JS Mill are not reassuring to this reader. I will just assume that you are not familiar with Friedmans massive opus and that, the passage of so many years has dulled your memory of what Mill actually wrote. I admit I read him when I was an undergraduate taking Rawls's course on Justice Pass Fail (I passed) and, sigh, many many many more years have passed since I was an undergraduate than since you were an undergraduate. But I think my quotes from memory are substantially accurate.

update: I checked them and I had forgotten in which book I read them rounghly 3 decades ago (sorry). I now suspect that you never read "Reflections on Representative Government" and apologise for questioning you memory.

Note that throughout Mill describes the 19th century USA as way to left wing.

I know you used the weasel phrase "recognizably derived from " but if your views actually were recognizably derived from Mills's, then there would be a whole lot of people genuinely to your left.

By the way, you write no one is to your left. This is odd, since you have also listed people to your left on one of your blogs (not this blog). You definitely once wrote that, in a meaningful way, Billmon is to your left. This occured when you were discussing the fact that in a test your ideology web page you came out a centrist (some time ago). You argued that the test was invalid and they called you centrist because you are consequentialist. I can't find the post (or the blog).

This is not the first time that Yglesias has shown alarming sympathy for a classical liberal. He also recently claimed

After all, if you assume Milton Friedman’s argument for a negative income tax were being made in good faith the main difference between Friedman and a contemporary American liberal is that Friedman was strongly anti-paternalist.

My comment on that one is that numbers matter

Huh ?!?!? You are not being quantitative. Just to be hypothetical, if Milton Friedman had advocated a negative income tax with maximum benefit of $1 per year, then he would be quite different from a contemporary liberal totally aside from paternalism. To know what he thought of welfare, you have to know what dollar amounts he had in mind and what the dollar was worth then.

His root and branch opposition to regulation was not just a matter of rejecting paternalism. Some regulation can't be understood as paternalistic. Anti-trust regulation is not based on paternalism. Anti-pollution regulation certainly isn't.

I think that Atrios and DeLong and Krugman better get on the phone (or skype or whatever) STAT and give Mr Yglesias a talking to.

You can have your own opinions, but you can't have your own language.

Pendanting redundancy.

You know pedanting is probably redundant. I'm pretty sure that "ant" is Latin for "ing." "ante" is Italian for "ing" (unless it is "ando")

by Keith Humphreys

The term “old adage” is very widely used. To see a few examples just from today’s news alone, look here, here and here. The snag is that an “adage” is by definition old, so the modifier is redundant and confusing: It implies incorrectly that there are new adages to which the “old adage” is being compared.

[skip]

I realized that comments labelling the pointing out of incorrect usage as pedantic and/or trivial rubbed me the wrong way. This is why:

(1) It is, or should be, a joy to learn. When I learn things I am happy and grateful. I hope my Stanford students and mentees are happy and grateful when they learn things. I dislike the premise that when people learn something, they are being aggressed against by a pedant toward whom they should feel contemptuous.

(2) [skip]

(3) I don’t like galloping individualism in word definition because it seems to me a failure of social responsibility. We learn languages and agree on certain rules and meanings so that we can communicate with each other. To privilege a personal desire to use language incorrectly over the connective possibilities of shared meaning seems selfish to me.

(4) [skip]

My comments

I assume that the college friend is not William Safire but is, in the immortal words of George Orwell [,]* “a totally different person.” [“as I please” Tribune 1947. Yes, Orwell wrote that . It can happen to anyone. Impressive as always, he also published it as an example of redundancy “For the first time I realised what a stupid expression this is. As though there could be such a thing as a partially different person !”


Now this is delicate. I am not convinced that there is an English verb "to Aggress" and I am very sure that there isn't an English verb "to aggress against" (three words being one two many for an infinitive). I don't want to make you feel aggressed against. Least of all by my eagerness to end a sentence with a preposition, but there seems to be a problem if a verb demands a particular preposition. Were you hoping that people would think that you had aggressed for them or aggressed with them or what ?

I believe that the English translation of "to aggress against" is "to attack." Now "attack" is a bit too vigorous and clear and we can't have that. Or perhaps you think that commenters might have felt that to correct English is "to insult." Quite frankly, I think you have aggressed against the English language in this post.

I think I will however, give up on "to privilege." In origin this was an incorrect translation of a perfectly ordinary French verb "privileger or something -- I can't spell English and I surely can't spell French). I believe the correct English translation is "to favor." I think it is a bad sign when an ordinary word in one language becomes a jargon term in another. In this case, there is also a clear rhetorical trick. To say that a privilege is unjustified privilege is almost redundant. We are democrats and opposed to privilege. Accusing someone of privileging suggests that the act of privileging is unjustified, because of the negative connotation of privilege.

I wonder in what fraction of use of the fairly new verb "to privilege" is the act of privileging praised ? I can't recall any. A verb with a neutral denotation which is never used to uhm privilege the act it describes is a rhetorical shortcut which can be damaging to clear thinking. Now I agree that you explain why you privilege " the connective possibilities of shared meaning" over "a personal desire to use language incorrectly over the connective possibilities of shared meaning."

I think the meaning of your sentence would be little changed if you had written [To privilege the connective possibilities of shared meaning over a personal desire to use language incorrectly seems unselfish to me].
Note that I used the ultimate weasel word "little" since the fact that one choice is unselfish does not logically imply that the other is selfish. Can you imagine writing the alternative sentence ? If not, do we have a problem here ?

* oh crap I left out a comma when pedanting.

Paul Krugman has been outdone by someone else who works for the New York Times

"Opinions on Shape of Earth Differ; Both Sides Have a Point" was exteme but
"In Battle Over Health Law, Math Cuts Both Ways" is the epitome of a nadir.

The key word which Krugman missed is "math". To Krugman math is a set of artificially constructed theoretical systems in which meanings are more than usually precise and answers often have a right answer and a wrong answer.

For a true journamalist, math is black magic and any claim in math might be true. It is the perfect setting for he said he said.

I do not blame the headline guy. The article by DAVID M. HERSZENHORN is as appalling as the headline. The article contains plainly false claims on matters of fact. One is clear enough that the New York Times must publish a correction.

In this case the debate in which both sides have a point (by the jounamalists definition of debate) is between the CBO and Republicans in congress. Note that the non-partisan CBO is considered one side of the debate. No Democrats in congress are quoted at all. The debate is over the fact that the CBO scores repeal of the affordable care act as adding to the deficit. Notably, according to the rules of the last congress, this verdict is final. Not because the CBO is God (or even Moses) but just because some terms must be defined, the CBO scoring is written into the rules (and will be again as soon as the Republicans are done with their repeal the ACA stunt)

Herszenshon makes no mention of the fact that rejecting the CBO score is generally not allowed. The CBO score becomes just one opinion among many. Unfortunately for Ballance, the argument against the CBO score includes many lies.

Mr Herszenhorn asserts "The Democrats designed the health care law so that most of the cuts and new taxes begin early while most of the spending, on insurance subsidies, for instance, begins in 2014." I stress this claim is made in his name and in the name of the Times. It is a false claim which must be corrected. The weasle word "most" doesn't do the trick. It is there because the excise tax starts well after 2014. In fact, the tax increases and spending cuts roughly track the spending increases. The claim in the New York Times is deliberately vague but still false.

A grosser falsehood (in this case a lie) is put in the mouths of un named "Republicans." "The Republicans also say that the budget rules effectively double-count nearly $400 billion in Medicare savings as both reducing the cost of the health care law and prolonging the life of the Medicare trust fund." This is false. All of the budget rules discussed in the article are CBO rules which do not estimate the life of the Medicare trust fund. The DBO did not double count. Herszenhorn knows this. That is why instead of writing "the CBO" as in the rest of the article he wrote "the budget rules." In this case as well he is attempting to mislead the reader. Again he fails. Via Ezra Klein note Paul Ryan admitting that the CBO didn't double count

By stating a false claim of fact without either noting that it is false or allowing someone honest to contest the claim, Herszenhorn effectively makes the claim his own.

He goes on to do it again "They also complain that the projections omitted $115 billion in spending required to administer the law"! This claim is false. $115 is the forecast discretionary budget of agencies in any way involved with implementing the ACA. It is not an estimate of additional funding which congress is predicted to appropriate because of the bill. In any case, that would require new bills and Republicans don't have to vote for them. The same post by Klein again

The $115 billion isn't "implementation" but "discretionary spending." And most of that spending predates the bill. As CBO Director Doug Elmendorf said, "CBO’s discretionary baseline, which assumes that 2010 appropriations are extended with adjustments for anticipated inflation, already accounts for much of the potential discretionary spending under PPACA." The exact amount it already accounts for is $86 billion.

One car argue about the predicted additional $29 billion but not about the $86 billion which are just past appropriations of the agencies updated for inflation. The $29 billion forecast almost certainly won't occur, since Republicans will not vote for them.

The outlay of the article is as bad as the errors of fact. Long befor explaining the CBO estimates Herszenhorn writes the colorful and totally nonsensical

And, for the love of gravity and basic mathematics, how can the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the official scorekeeper charged with keeping count of the nation’s fiscal condition, say that it would cost the government $230 billion over 10 years to repeal a law that would spend $930 billion to extend health insurance to 32 million people?

Evidently in the sub first grade understanding he ascribed to his readers A-B>0. The problem is that many readers will just read the first few paragraphs and most will remember "the love of gravity and basic mathematics" long after they have forgotton the tiny bits of mathematics allowed into the article.

This is mainstream journalism at its worst. If a major party argues somethign based on lies and nonsense, then counteraguments which would show them to be fools and or knaves must be suppressed. Math is totally mysterious. Plainly false claims of fact must not be checked because saying that a claim is false is shrill and unbalanced. Perhaps I overstate my claim. I have seen no evidence that such nonsense is repeated with so much deference if it comes from the Democrats.

There are lies, damn lies and statistics as presented by the MSM.