[Vision2020] Ferguson vs. Krugman: Where Are the Real Conservative Intellectuals?

[Art Deco]

*The Newyorker*

Ferguson vs. Krugman: Where Are the Real Conservative Intellectuals?
Posted by John Cassidy<http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/bios/john_cassidy/search?contributorName=John%20Cassidy>

[image: niall-ferguson.jpg]

There’s nothing like a
scrap<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/20/paul-krugman-niall-ferguson-newsweek_n_1810136.html>between
two seasoned brawlers to liven up a Monday in the dog days of
August. In the red corner, Niall Campbell Douglas Ferguson, Laurence A.
Tisch professor of history at Harvard and conservative bomb-thrower in
residence at the Daily Beast/*Newsweek*. In the blue corner, Paul Robin
Krugman, Nobel-winning economist, Princeton prof, and designated liberal
curmudgeon at the *Times*.

As fans of political sparring will recall, these two have mixed it up
before—numerous times, in fact, mainly over the Obama stimulus. The cause
of their latest spat: a characteristically overstated *Newsweek* cover
story<http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/08/19/niall-ferguson-on-why-barack-obama-needs-to-go.html>by
Ferguson arguing that it’s time to replace Obama. (Headline: “Hit the
Road Barack: Why We Need a New President.”) Krugman, who has been spending
the last few weeks hiking through some pretty-looking
hills<http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/18/over-the-hump-status-update/>,
interrupted his vacation to accuse his old nemesis of misrepresenting the
facts<http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/unethical-commentary-newsweek-edition/>in
claiming that Obamacare will add more than a trillion dollars to the
deficit over the next ten years.

Nothing very surprising there, you might say. Ferguson, a prolific author
whose “end is nigh” worldview makes him a popular speaker on the
hedge-fund/Davos circuit, has been railing away at the Obama Administration
since 2009, warning that its profligate spending policies were sending the
U.S.A. the way of Greece. The equally indefatigable Krugman has been
lecturing Ferguson for almost as long about his ignorance of elementary
(Keynesian) economics and the bond market. (If people in the markets truly
believed Ferguson’s analysis, the U.S. government would never be able to
issue ten-year bonds with a yield of well
under<http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/interest-rates/Pages/TextView.aspx?data=realyield>two
per cent.)

What *is* pretty remarkable about the latest dustup is the weakness of the
arguments presented by Ferguson, a streetwise public intellectual who,
according
to his Web site<http://www.niallferguson.com/site/FERG/Templates/Home.aspx?pageid=1&cc=GB>,
now holds positions at four different élite academic institutions. If
called upon three months before an election to pen a provocative cover
story in a national newsmagazine clamoring for the President to be chucked
out, most writers would make every effort to avoid giving the other side
easy opportunities to tear down their arguments. And yet, here comes
Ferguson blatantly twisting a report from the Congressional Budget Office
and presenting numerous other distortions and half-truths that anybody with
access to Google could discredit in a few hours.

It all got me pondering anew a question that’s been been on my mind every
day since Mitt Romney picked Paul Ryan as his running mate: Where are the
real conservative intellectuals these days? Surely there must be some, but
sometimes it seems like all the right has to offer is a soap-box mountebank
like Ryan, a trio of embittered Supreme Court Justices, and a few gnarled
old Washington fixtures like Bill Kristol, George Will, and Charles
Krauthammer. Given this vacuum, it’s relatively easy for an energetic and
disputatious blow-in like Ferguson to emerge as one of Obama’s most
visible, if not exactly persuasive, critics.

The immediate bone of contention is the fiscal impact of the Affordable
Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare. On this, I have some sympathy for Ferguson’s
argument that it is likely to be substantial. Providing tens of millions of
uninsured Americans hefty subsidies to buy private insurance will surely be
an expensive business. The history of other entitlement programs, such as
Medicare, suggests initial cost estimates often prove overoptimistic, and
that could well prove to be true here. But rather than making this
argument, Ferguson took another tack, implying that the official actuaries
had already said the reforms would add substantially to the deficit. He
wrote,

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.

 Actually, that’s true as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go nearly far
enough. In addition to providing subsidies for the uninsured, the A.C.A.
included tax increases on premium insurance plans, the imposition of
certain user fees, and significant cuts in Medicare spending. As Krugman
rightly pointed out, when the scorers from the C.B.O./Joint Committee took
these changes into account, they concluded that the A.C.A. would actually
reduce the deficit slightly rather than adding to it. You don’t have to
look very hard at the C.B.O./Joint Committee report
(pdf<http://cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/ftpdocs/121xx/doc12119/03-30-healthcarelegislation.pdf>)
to see the relevant numbers. They are right there in Table 1 on page 2:
over the period from 2012 to 2022, the A.C.A. would reduce the deficit by
$210 billion.

Ferguson omitted any mention of this figure. Upon being challenged, he
posted a rebuttal<http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/08/20/newsweek-cover-rebuttal-paul-krugman-is-wrong.html>on
the Daily Beast in which he tried to bluff his way through, calling
Krugman’s objection “truly feeble,” and adding: “I very deliberately said
‘the insurance coverage provisions of the ACA,’ not ‘the ACA.’ There is a
big difference.” There surely is—not that the readers of the
*Newsweek*cover story would know that.

In assailing Krugman, though, Ferguson committed another no-no for
journalists and historians: selectively editing a quotation to support his
argument. In assessing the financial consequences of Obamacare, a lot
depends on whether you believe it will succeed in slowing the annual growth
of spending on Medicare from about four per cent, the average rate during
the past two decades, to two per cent. Ferguson is skeptical. As it
happens, so am I. But he didn’t just say that. Instead, he cited a passage
about the Medicare cost cuts from the C.B.O./J.C.T. report, and ended with
this quote: “It is unclear whether such a reduction can be achieved…”,
thereby implying that the official bean counters had cost doubt on whether
the economies would ever materialize.

But note the ellipsis at the end of the quote. Enter Dylan Byers, a media
reporter at *Politico*, with a post
entitled<http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2012/08/niall-fergusons-ridiculous-misleading-defense-132551.html>“Niall
Ferguson’s ridiculous defense.” Byers called up the C.B.O. report
and looked up what Ferguson had left out. Here is the sentence in full:

It is unclear whether such a reduction can be achieved through greater
efficiencies in the delivery of healthcare or will instead reduce access to
care or the quality of care (relative to the situation under prior law.)

Clearly, this has a rather different meaning than the one Ferguson intended
to put across. Byers sums things up this way:

*So contrary to what Ferguson leads readers to believe*, the CBO report
does not state that the reduction is “unclear.” What is “unclear” is
whether the reduction will come through greater efficiencies in healthcare
delivery or reduced access to care.

So, one more time: The Oxford-trained, Harvard-employed, Newsweek
contibutor Niall Ferguson just edited the CBO report to change its meaning.

This isn’t a fair fight. It’s as if Ferguson were inviting Krugman and
others to knock him to the canvas, which they are doing with great
enthusiasm. At the *Atlantic*, Matthew O’Brien identifies twelve—yes, a
dozen—claims in the *Newsweek* cover story that don’t stack
up<http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/08/a-full-factcheck-of-niall-fergusons-very-bad-argument-against-obama/261306/>,
including some misleading figures for job losses and a bizarre suggestion
that the Administration’s Wall Street reforms didn’t tackle excessive
leverage at the big banks. (A more accurate statement would be that
excessive leverage was one of the few big financial issues the
Administration did address.) At the Web site of the New York *Daily News*,
David Swerdlick points out
that<http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/the_rumble/2012/08/niall-ferguson-is-wrong-about-obama%E2%80%99s-foreign-policy-too>“Niall
Ferguson is wrong about Obama’s foreign policy, too.”

So, a bad day for Ferguson, not that I’d be overly concerned about him. A
feisty and self-confident Glaswegian, he doubtless thinks his journalistic
critics are missing the wood for the trees. And if all the attention he has
brought to *Newsweek* helps it to sell a few more copies and survive for a
few more months, the consequences of today’s brouhaha won’t be all bad. But
what of the right in general? Where does that stand?

Reaganism/Thatcherism, for all its faults, was a genuine intellectual
movement, or counter-movement. These days, the right seems unable to rise
above rabble-rousing. The end of the Cold War robbed it of an external
enemy. The tensions between its social and economic wings robbed it of any
internal cohesion. The financial crisis and Great Recession robbed it of a
creed—laissez faire. It’s still got plenty of willing foot soldiers, and a
lot of big money behind it, but where is the fresh thinking and
intellectual direction? All that’s left is anti-government posturing,
waving the flag, and Obama-bashing. And even in pursuing this limited
agenda, it often gets its facts wrong.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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