Don’t be dense december, they didn’t correct anything.
They removed the bullet point that contained the supposed mistake, rather than correct it.
If it were an honest mistake, they would have simply corrected the number. They didn’t, because that would have had them admitting in bold type to the fact that 40% of the reduction in surplus over the next 10 years was lost to the tax cut. So instead of correcting the text, they deleted it: and they they tried to keep it a secret that they had revised the reprort after publication.
You would have us believe that they were so careless that they accidently changed some figures in their bullet points from news that made Bush look irresponsible to news that made him look good (or at least neutral). And this isn’t a mistake buried in the details, but right up front in the summary! Nobody is that careless.
An honest mistake would have been corrected differently, thus we conclude that the mistake was not honest. Krugman is vindicated, and you are left grasping at rationalizations.
No, “Orwellian” would be if they changed, er, rectified the chocolate supply projection.
But it is a highly suspicious thing to change it without acknowledging that it is a correction. It just leads one to wonder what else has been changed without fanfare.
I see. I had hoped that your lack of reply to my previous post was an “honest mistake,” attributable to your not having revisited the thread since I posted.
I don’t think that can be said anymore. I’d warn december that there’s really no point in aguing with you as you seem to have the unadmirable practice of simply engaging in the drive by posting, and when you’re put on the spot you simply disapear.
As flowbark said, “the root ‘lie’ tends to raise eyebrows and is thus avoided in polite company”.
Yes, Tejota made a similar point. It would be nice if people would always call attention to modifications on their web sites. However:
Corrections and changes without notice are made routinely on the web. I recently had quite a back-and-forth with Sua over the BBC doing just that. He thought I had copied inaccurately, but it turned out that the BBC had modified their column, but not said so. In that thread I also provided an example of NPR changing their web site without pointing out the change.
Even if OMB was deceptive in the way they made their correction, that has nothing to do with Krugman’s point. Krugman’s accusation of “lie” wasn’t that the error had been fixed on the QT. He didn’t even mention that it had already been fixed. He may or may not have been aware of the correction. Krugman’s complaint was simply about the original wrong number, which he wrongly called a “lie.”
PS – Why did Krugman use the word “lie”? Perhaps because there would have been no interest otherwise. OMB puts out zillions of numbers; no doubt some of them must be wrong.
Imagine how Krugman’s column would read without the hype:
*“One of OMB’s figures was incorrect, but they subsequently fixed the problem.” *
It’s not worth putting in a column, is it? Sounds like The Onion.
*“One of OMB’s figures was incorrect, but they subsequently fixed the problem.”
*
Nah, december, yours is the abridged version.
The actual column would read like this.
One of OMB’s figures published false information on the tax cut.
An organization noticed and Paul Krugman reported it in his column.
The OMB wrote an angry letter to the Times alleging that an “error” had been made and “retracted.”
But rather than “retract” an “error”–which is to say to acknowledge it–the OMB simply made the false bullet disappear.
Anyone who reads newspapers and other published matter knows what a retraction looks like: it involves publicizing one’s error, not sweeping it under the carpet as though it had never been. When websites change over the course of the day they are presumably not “retracting” anything; but making an editorial change.
In any case, the fact that the false information was discussed in The New York Times would seem to call a more rigorous address: a retraction might be the way to go, though I’d settle for correct information abou the tax cut.
Sounds doubleplusbad to me ;).
There is a world of difference between updating a website and quietly back-editing an official document.
Thanks for pulling the reference to the L-word though; I had looked at the wrong column, apparently.
Furthermore, I would submit that when surpluses as far as the eye can see transmogrify into chronic budget deficits (even adjusting for the business cycle), conditions call for energetic opinion columns.
But that’s just me. Not all of us are fiscal conservatives.
Well, at least one person invited Tejota back to the discussion with a pass on the petty little bull kaka:
You seemed to agree at the time (over a week and a half ago; elucidator’s point, I believe). I guess the ‘new civility’ bequeathed to us by Mandelstam was hard for some parties to maintain.
*" The latest antics of the White House Office of Management and Budget have even the most hardened cynics shaking their heads. It’s not just that projections for fiscal 2002 have gone from a $150 billion surplus to a $165 billion deficit in the space of a few months; it’s not just that the O.M.B. projects a much smaller deficit next year, when everyone else ? including the Republican staff of the Senate Budget Committee ? says the deficit will increase. It’s also the fact that O.M.B officials simply lie about what their own report says.
“The recession erased two-thirds of the projected 10-year surplus. . . . The tax cut, which economists credit for helping the economy recover, generated less than 15% of the change.” So reads the agency’s press release. Yet as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out, the actual report attributes 40 percent of the budget deterioration to tax cuts, only 10 percent to recession. Maybe dishonesty in the defense of tax cuts is no vice."*
I don’t see how anyone, at the time the column was written, can have known whether the OMB “lied” (which is to say erred" on purpose) or simply erred by accident. Given the tone of Krugman’s column–strident polemic–I am not surprised to find the world “lie” here. By writing “lie” instead of, say, “misreport,” Krugman took the risk that those responsible would say that they had not lied but erred. That was his choice. However, it’s worth noting that Krugman didn’t lie when he said the OMB had lied; he simply erred. Nor is he is disputing that point.
No, Krugman is not now insisting that the OMB lied–but he is saying that they deceived when they claimed to “retract” an “error.”
Based on what we know, I’d say that that claim is neither a lie, nor an error.
Like many columnists, Krugman writes in a polemical style. That in itself is something we can debate but, to state the obvious, Krugman is not the only participant in this style of political discourse.
At bottom we have what was, at worst, an error about a lie that was actually an error.
What is undisputed is that the American people were misinformed by an arm of their government and, when the office in question was called on it, in public, the removal of the misinformation was done without further account to the public. Yet by calling it a “retraction,” the same office implied a public account that never took place.
We can argue all day long about just how grievously Orwellian this action was or wasn’t.
I will say this: if I made a serious mistake on my website–one that just happened to be politically advantageous for me–and if the New York Times then reported my mistake, I would make my apology for and correction of the mistake a matter of public record. That is I would “retract” my “error.”
Covering up my error and then calling it a retraction is indeed doublespeak.
(I have this creepy feeling that someone is about to post an excerpt from a dictionary: to wit, “lie”.)
Should the OMB have made a “bigger fuss”? Ah, what a nugget of Decembrist spin! As if it were demanded that the OMB make noises like a hen laying a cubic egg! Well, perhaps not necessarily a “bigger” fuss, how about any fuss at all?
And this booshwa about an “error”. Balderdash, sir! Tommyrot!
Are we to believe that this document was thrown together in haste? And this unpleasant little un-fact slithered its way onto the page? No, that simply won’t do, that dog will not lick its balls.
It buggers credulity to suppose that the original document was an unintentional gaffe, an “oopsy!”. After all, these aren’t late night pizza gobbling Clintonistas. These are the “grown-ups”, “sucessful CEO’s” who are running the government “like a business”.
Oscar Wilde once said something like a gentleman never insults anyone unintentionally. A similar point might be made about the Bushies and mendacity.
"(I have this creepy feeling that someone is about to post an excerpt from a dictionary: to wit, “lie”.)
"
Not to worry 'lu. I keep my 24-volume OED right next to my Quaker’s non-violence pledge and my pistols.
Oh and I should have made clearer in my last that I am not in the least personally convinced that what the OMB called an “error” was any such thing. Nor, if indeed it was an error, am I heartened by the thought that my government is employing incompetents whose blunders are the functional equivalent of brazen lies.
He should repair at once to the Chapel of Our Lady of the Immaculate Preemption. There he can unburden his soul to St. Ari of Fleisher, Patron Saint of Retroactive Conception. Or to the much maligned St. Ron of Ziegler, who first stated the Republican Coda of Malleable Truth:
Actually, 'lu, I don’t think december is saying that Krugman’s a liar; only that he’s “mean-spirited,” etc.
To be honest, I sometimes wish that Krugman would turn his rhetoric down a notch (though that is not to say that he ever lies; and I’m willing to bet that Limbaugh has a much higher record of reporting factual inaccuracies than does Krugman who, IMO, still observes the usual social-scientific criteria, if not the decorum, of a prestigious economist).
In all other respects I think your, um, colorful metaphor holds up.
*DOBBS: I’m getting the sense, as I’m sure many of your readers are, that you really just don’t like this man, President Bush.
KRUGMAN: Let me put it this way. There’s a – no administration I can remember has tried so hard to make the president’s character a substitute for concrete action, that when I was – when the corporate scandals began to erupt, I had a great concern, which I still have, that the administration was going to substitute histrionic outrage for real action, and then they were going to say, here is – we have a man of character, trust him.
The fact is he’s got a murky business career. There’s probably nothing illegal in there[emphasis added], but it’s not the image that the administration wants you to believe in.*
So in regards to the OP, Krugman says no, he’s probably not a crook.
But speaking of lies…
*DOBBS: OK, but, Paul, certainly you would not be suggesting, as Bob Rubin did recently, that we would, in the face of recession, should be raising taxes.
KRUGMAN: Bob Rubin didn’t suggest that either. He suggested canceling the tax cuts that are scheduled later in the decade, which I think is an excellent idea because those tax cuts later in the decade make no sense given what we now know about the budget picture.*
Did Lou Dobbs lie about what Rubin said, or did misrepresent it? It’s a neat little trick in politics, release something you know not to be true, then correct it quiety while the “lie” does its thing. Ken Lay slept in the White House during Clinton’s term? No, it was Bush I’s term, but did you hear anyone in the media put a lot of effort into correcting that, outside of the lefties? The OMB may well have thought “hey, put out the bogus numbers, let them be distributed by Rush about how the tax cut isn’t as bad as what the Democrats say, then we can quietly change them once the coast is clear.” That would not surprise me one bit.
Well, December overuse of the word “lie” is one of my pet peeves. So, IMHO, Krugman should have evaded that word.
It’s the sort of word that wise editors question. However, if Krugman is syndicated (and I’m not sure whether he is), I suspect that he isn’t kept on a particularly tight leash.
However. I fear that the underlying policy point is being lost.
It is also true that the OMB under Clinton made far more conservative forecasts of future budget deficits than the OMB under Reagan, Bush and Bush. Indeed, IIRC, one of the reforms that William Jefferson C. instituted was that the budget would be debated using one set of numbers, i.e. the most conservative ones as put forward by the CBO.
I urge GWB to re-establish probity and integrity in both governmental accounting and in public statements regarding the same.
