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Well yeah. All Ferguson got for working this con was a chair at Harvard. Ryan could end up a heartbeat away from the big red button, and four to eight years away from the biggest gravy train in the known universe.
From our friends at Lawyers, Guns and Money we learn (what most of us already suspected) that it's been a "hack" job all along.
Hacktacular!
There are indeed a substantial number of erroneous arguments in Niall Ferguson’s profoundly embarrassing op-ed, but I thought I’d focus on this one:
There are people willing to assert that the only taxes people pay are federal income taxes. There are people who have some business being paid to write essays. And there’s certainly no overlap between these two categories.
Welcome to Obama’s America: nearly half the population is not represented on a taxable return — almost exactly the same proportion that lives in a household where at least one member receives some type of government benefit. We are becoming the 50–50 nation — half of us paying the taxes, the other half receiving the benefits.
I could proceed to talk about his ridiculous claims that the ACA did nothing to address Medicare costs (oddly, the candidate Ferguson favors seems unaware of this), or his foolish assertions about Paul Ryan, but really, after that addressing his argument further would be superfluous. It’s a Renew America column with a marginally larger vocabulary.
Incidentally, Ferguson shows up in Annie Lowrey’s piece about conservative “intellectuals” who are bowled over by Paul Ryan. It seems odd that a transparent fraud like Ryan could get the reputation as some sort of wonk, but when you see what passes for an intellectual in Republican circles it starts to make sense.
Comments:
Hogan says:
Incidentally, Ferguson shows up in Annie Lowrey’s piece about conservative “intellectuals” who are bowled over by Paul Ryan.
Well yeah. All Ferguson got for working this con was a chair at Harvard. Ryan could end up a heartbeat away from the big red button, and four to eight years away from the biggest gravy train in the known universe.
Warren Terra says:
If you really want to seethe, try to sit through Niall Ferguson’s Wingnut-tastic 2012 Reith Lectures. Possibly one of the greatest honours and grandest platforms for a public intellectual in the English-speaking world, one person (occasionally more) is chosen every year; the list of past speakers is, with some exceptions, stellar.
As part of their campaign to placate the Tories (akin to trying to please an abusive parent), the Beeb gave the laurels to Ferguson this year. His lectures – at least the first one-and-a-half, before I gave up – were almost verbatim talking points from the intellectually shallow end of the Fox News empire, things William Kristol would have rejected as being too obviously false and disingenuous. The whole experience of realizing what was being done with the lectures was as embarrassing as it was excruciating.
TT says:
I wonder if Krugman is a raging alcoholic by now, because despite all of the column and blog space he’s devoted over the years to obliterating the next-level stupidity of both Ryan and Ferguson, those two con artists are apparenty at the height of their powers and are as prominent and “respected” as ever.
