{"id":9255,"date":"2006-12-06T09:00:42","date_gmt":"2006-12-06T14:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/9255.html"},"modified":"2006-12-06T09:00:42","modified_gmt":"2006-12-06T14:00:42","slug":"whos-lying-to-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/whos-lying-to-people\/","title":{"rendered":"Who’s ‘lying to people’?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I think most Americans would be well served to keep a few simple rules in mind: don’t challenge LeBron James to play one-on-one, don’t expect to beat Tiger Woods at golf, and don’t debate economics with Paul Krugman. Especially if you’re Fox News’ Neil Cavuto, and you don’t know what you’re talking about<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Princeton economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman went on Fox News this afternoon to talk about his new article in Rolling Stone Magazine, “How the Super-Rich Are Screwing America.”<\/p>\n

Krugman’s article is about how income inequality is getting worse and, as a result, even though some aggregate economic indicators are positive, most people aren’t benefiting. Cavuto told Krugman, “Here’s what I’m saying that you’re doing: You are lying to people.” Cavuto claims that income inequality isn’t “dramatically worse now than 10 years ago, 20 years ago.”<\/p>\n

Actually, Krugman is completely right: things are dramatically worse now than 10 or 20 years ago.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Economic Policy Institute even offers a handy chart that even a Fox News host should be able to understand.
\n
\n\"inequality\"<\/p>\n

As TP noted<\/a>, this “tracks the ratio of the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans to median income in the United States, a standard measure of income inequality.” It also, coincidentally, shows that Cavuto is wrong and Krugman is right. Go figure.<\/p>\n

After Cavuto accused Krugman of lying and being “snide,” he got into the substance:<\/p>\n

CAVUTO: No, no, you’re mentioning good data. You’re saying there’s a growing divide between the haves and have nots. Others have argued that very effectively and very eloquently, just like you. All I’m saying is that the math that applied now, can’t you apply it in other periods, when there have been Democratic presidents who’ve had the same dislocations? You’re saying that it’s somehow dramatically worse now than it was 10 years ago, 20 years ago? <\/p>\n

KRUGMAN: Yeah, actually, it is dramatically worse now than it was 10 years, 20 years ago. All of the measures of inequalities have just gone off the charts. It didn’t start with Bush — and I actually say that if anybody, you know, buy Rolling Stone, read the article — it actually starts even before Reagan, so this is not just Bush. The point of the matter is that, when, in these last five years, as it’s becomes clear that this is a really growing problem, that most people are not sharing in the economy’s growth, the policies of Bush have been at every point to push that inequality further.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’m sure Cavuto’s on-air apology will be forthcoming. Any minute now….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I think most Americans would be well served to keep a few simple rules in mind: don’t challenge LeBron James to play one-on-one, don’t expect to beat Tiger Woods at golf, and don’t debate economics with Paul Krugman. Especially if you’re Fox News’ Neil Cavuto, and you don’t know what you’re talking about. Princeton economist […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9255","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9255","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9255"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9255\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}