Sunday, July 27, 2014

Conservative Media's Favorite Economist Caught Distorting Facts About Taxes And Job Creation




http://mediamatters.org/blog/2014/07/25/conservative-medias-favorite-economist-caught-d/200213
Heritage Foundation Chief Economist Stephen Moore


Heritage Foundation chief economist Stephen Moore was caught using incorrect statistics to mislead readers about the relationship between tax cuts and job creation in the United States.
On July 7, Moore published an op-ed in The Kansas City Star attacking economic policies favored by Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman. The op-ed claimed that "places such as New York, Massachusetts, Illinois and California ... are getting clobbered by tax-cutting states." Moore went on to attack liberals for "cherry-picking a few events" in their arguments against major tax cuts, when in fact it was Moore who cited bad data to support his claims.
On July 24, The Kansas City Star published a correction to Moore's op-ed, specifically stating that the author had "misstated job growth rates for four states and the time period covered." The editorial board of the Star inserted this annotation to Moore's inaccurate claims:
Please see editor's note at the top of this column.
No-income-tax Texas gained 1 million jobs over the last five years, California, with its 13 percent tax rate, managed to lose jobs. Oops. Florida gained hundreds of thousands of jobs while New York lost jobs. NOTE: These figures are incorrect. The time period covered was December 2007 to December 2012. Over that time, Texas gained 497,400 jobs, California lost 491,200, Florida lost 461,500 and New York gained 75,900. Oops. Illinois raised taxes more than any other state over the last five years and its credit rating is the second lowest of all the states, below that of Kansas! (emphasis original)
On July 25, Star columnist Yael Abouhalkah explained the correction in more detail. Abouhalkah wrote that Moore had "used outdated and inaccurate job growth information at a key point in his article" and that Moore should have used data from 2009 to 2014, rather than from 2007 to 2012.
 Abouhalkah also argued that "the problems with Moore's opinion article damaged his credMoore has referred to unemployment insurance as a "paid vacation" for jobless Americans and bizarrely claimed that laws guaranteeing paid sick leave for full-time workers were "very dangerous for cities." Moore spent years basely claiming that the Affordable Care Act would reduce job creation, seamlessly transitioning from one debunked talking point to the next along the way.
 He is also an outspoken opponent of increasing the minimum wage, claiming that even a moderate rise in wages would result in a "big increase" in unemployment. In a recent foray out of the safety of right-wing media, Moore's anti-living wage spin was easily cut down by CNN anchor Carol Costello.ibility on the jobs issue."

these people who are credited with supposedly knowing their stuff, should know better or they have perpetrated such a fraud on the public to get their ,looks like undeserved credentials, or they are right wing zealots who will toss anything in the bases trough seemingly oblivious to the fact that there has been a track record on overwhelming amounts of misinformation that has been rebuked usually within the same news cycle. 

are they like the rest just putting it out there banking on their base and readers will not stray from their media outlets so will not hear the disgraceful attempt to mislead them?  you have to wonder are these right wing intellectuals and think tanks and such just reinforcing the mantle of "the party of stupid, stupider, stupidest"? 

not only the base hears it but everyone else does to and they are not half of the population so technically they should not have a snowball's chance in hell of being elected, except American voters are fickle and more times than not vote against their own interest, is that what they are depending on, given they lie with impunity?