The title says it all.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123431484726570949.html

The Wall Street Journal, 11 February 2009.

Joe Gwinn

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
The title says it all.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123431484726570949.html

The Wall Street Journal, 11 February 2009.

He and Peggy Noonan are still trying to rewrite history Joe.

JC

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
The title says it all.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123431484726570949.html

The Wall Street Journal, 11 February 2009.

Joe Gwinn

Peter Ferrara, known as the "Payola Pundit" for his op-eds-for-pay deal with
Jack Abramoff, is the guy who brought us the idea of privatizing Social
Security, among other ideology-driven blunders.

Don't put much stock in him, Joe. He's totally skewed the facts in that
op-ed, which is something he does all the time. More honest is Reagan's
chastened Budget Director, David Stockman, who said ""If the [Securities and
Exchange Commission] had jurisdiction over the White House, we might have
all had time for a course in remedial economics at Allenwood Penitentiary."

Except for Carter appointee Paul Volcker, Reagan's economists were a greedy
and wacky bunch about whom, Stockman also said, "None of us really
understand what's going on with all these numbers."

The economic points about Reagan are that our recovery from stagflation had
nothing to do with anything he or his crew did; it was done by Volcker's
policies, which were approved by Carter. And Reagan drove us into the
biggest national debt in peacetime history. Reagonomics, as an economic
philosophy, directly sowed the seeds of our current collapse.

--
Ed Huntress

"Ed Huntress" wrote in message
...

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
The title says it all.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123431484726570949.html

The Wall Street Journal, 11 February 2009.

Joe Gwinn

Peter Ferrara, known as the "Payola Pundit" for his op-eds-for-pay deal
with Jack Abramoff, is the guy who brought us the idea of privatizing
Social Security, among other ideology-driven blunders.

Don't put much stock in him, Joe. He's totally skewed the facts in that
op-ed, which is something he does all the time. More honest is Reagan's
chastened Budget Director, David Stockman, who said ""If the [Securities
and Exchange Commission] had jurisdiction over the White House, we might
have all had time for a course in remedial economics at Allenwood
Penitentiary."

Except for Carter appointee Paul Volcker, Reagan's economists were a
greedy and wacky bunch about whom, Stockman also said, "None of us really
understand what's going on with all these numbers."

The economic points about Reagan are that our recovery from stagflation
had nothing to do with anything he or his crew did; it was done by
Volcker's policies, which were approved by Carter. And Reagan drove us
into the biggest national debt in peacetime history. Reagonomics, as an
economic philosophy, directly sowed the seeds of our current collapse.



And as I said Ed,
Pete and Peggy are reinventing history.

JC

"John R. Carroll" wrote in message
...

"Ed Huntress" wrote in message
...

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
The title says it all.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123431484726570949.html

The Wall Street Journal, 11 February 2009.

Joe Gwinn

Peter Ferrara, known as the "Payola Pundit" for his op-eds-for-pay deal
with Jack Abramoff, is the guy who brought us the idea of privatizing
Social Security, among other ideology-driven blunders.

Don't put much stock in him, Joe. He's totally skewed the facts in that
op-ed, which is something he does all the time. More honest is Reagan's
chastened Budget Director, David Stockman, who said ""If the [Securities
and Exchange Commission] had jurisdiction over the White House, we might
have all had time for a course in remedial economics at Allenwood
Penitentiary."

Except for Carter appointee Paul Volcker, Reagan's economists were a
greedy and wacky bunch about whom, Stockman also said, "None of us really
understand what's going on with all these numbers."

The economic points about Reagan are that our recovery from stagflation
had nothing to do with anything he or his crew did; it was done by
Volcker's policies, which were approved by Carter. And Reagan drove us
into the biggest national debt in peacetime history. Reagonomics, as an
economic philosophy, directly sowed the seeds of our current collapse.



And as I said Ed,
Pete and Peggy are reinventing history.

JC

I'll never understand why people take the WSJ opinion pages seriously. We
used to read it on the train to NY every day. Their news coverage was
excellent, particularly of business news. But their opinion columns were an
entertaining joke, even among the laissez-faire financial guys.

--
Ed Huntress

On Sun, 15 Feb 2009 15:56:33 -0500, Joseph Gwinn
wrote:

The title says it all.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123431484726570949.html

The Wall Street Journal, 11 February 2009.

Joe Gwinn


So in other words...the Left is going to Tax and Spend our way into
prosperity......

Fascinating.

But not unexpected.

Im hearing the water swirling in the toilet.......


"Upon Roosevelt's death in 1945, H. L. Mencken predicted in his diary
that Roosevelt would be remembered as a great president, "maybe even
alongside Washington and Lincoln," opining that Roosevelt "had every
quality that morons esteem in their heroes.""

In article ,
"Ed Huntress" wrote:

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
The title says it all.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123431484726570949.html

The Wall Street Journal, 11 February 2009.

Joe Gwinn

Peter Ferrara, known as the "Payola Pundit" for his op-eds-for-pay deal with
Jack Abramoff, is the guy who brought us the idea of privatizing Social
Security, among other ideology-driven blunders.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem


Don't put much stock in him, Joe. He's totally skewed the facts in that
op-ed, which is something he does all the time. More honest is Reagan's
chastened Budget Director, David Stockman, who said ""If the [Securities and
Exchange Commission] had jurisdiction over the White House, we might have
all had time for a course in remedial economics at Allenwood Penitentiary."

Except for Carter appointee Paul Volcker, Reagan's economists were a greedy
and wacky bunch about whom, Stockman also said, "None of us really
understand what's going on with all these numbers."

The economic points about Reagan are that our recovery from stagflation had
nothing to do with anything he or his crew did; it was done by Volcker's
policies, which were approved by Carter. And Reagan drove us into the
biggest national debt in peacetime history. Reagonomics, as an economic
philosophy, directly sowed the seeds of our current collapse.

Ed, I really don't care if he's a running dog. Even saints can speak
untruths, even thieves can speak the truth. The problem is to tell
which is which.

What points that he made would you dispute, and why?

Joe Gwinn

On Sun, 15 Feb 2009 16:18:52 -0800, Gunner Asch
wrote:

On Sun, 15 Feb 2009 15:56:33 -0500, Joseph Gwinn
wrote:
The title says it all.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123431484726570949.html
The Wall Street Journal, 11 February 2009.
Joe Gwinn
-----------
So in other words...the Left is going to Tax and Spend our way into
prosperity......
Fascinating.
But not unexpected.

Im hearing the water swirling in the toilet.......

=============
It is the highest irony, worthy of O'Henry, that the necessary
conditions/rationales for extensive governmental intervention, if
not overt interference, in the economy were generated, not by the
radical left but the actions and omissions of the extreme
neo-conservative/reactionary right.

Be assured that as long as the Republican districts/states and
the Republican campaign donors in those areas get "their fair
share" of stimulus funds, bypartisanship will continue. It is
worth noting that by far the largest hogs at the TARP/stimulus
trough are the financial services industries.

The problem is that "desperate situations demand desperate
remedies. If you don't like/want the desperate remedies, then
avoid the conditions that result in the desperate situations. In
other words, if you recreate the conditions of 1928, expect a
1929 to follow.

Another serious problem is that there are regulations and there
are regulations.

In too many cases we as a nation appear to have "thrown the baby
out with the bath water" when the regulations were
reduced/eliminated, and in other cases, kept the easily enforced
[against the average citizen] nit picky regulations that
contribute little or nothing to the safety or security of
society, while eliminating or ignoring enforcement of essential
regulations.

A current example is the failure of the Texas Department of
Health, resulting from a failure of oversight by the FDA, to
enforce even the most elementary hygiene standards [i.e. no bird
turds or rat **** in the product] on a peanut butter
manufacturer. As a direct result, 8 people are known to have been
killed, 600+ hospitalized, an unknown number were off work,
estimated in the thousands, and millions of dollars worth of
possibly contaminated products using this peanut butter have had
to be recalled and destroyed.

In the days past, if a local concern manufactured a food item and
it sickened an entire town, and killed several of the residents,
including children, the building would have most likely have been
torched and the proprietor would be giving thanks he was not
inside. (assuming he wasn't)

This sort of immediate and direct community feedback no longer
operates in today's highly centralized, convoluted and arcane
markets, and regulation must be substituted if interstate and
regional trade in food [in this particular case] is to continue,
and "vigilante adjudication of grievances" to be
avoided/minimized.


Unka' George [George McDuffee]
-------------------------------------------
He that will not apply new remedies,
must expect new evils:
for Time is the greatest innovator: and
if Time, of course, alter things to the worse,
and wisdom and counsel shall not alter them to the better,
what shall be the end?

Francis Bacon (1561-1626), English philosopher, essayist, statesman.
Essays, "Of Innovations" (1597-1625).

On Sun, 15 Feb 2009 19:39:35 -0600, F. George McDuffee
wrote:


Be assured that as long as the Republican districts/states and
the Republican campaign donors in those areas get "their fair
share" of stimulus funds, bypartisanship will continue. It is
worth noting that by far the largest hogs at the TARP/stimulus
trough are the financial services industries.


I believe I posted several links about States backing away from the
"fair share" not long ago.

As far as the peanut butter thing goes..the failure wasnt with the
FDA..but with the management of the company.

You dont blame the cops for a bank robbery, do you?

Gunner

"Upon Roosevelt's death in 1945, H. L. Mencken predicted in his diary
that Roosevelt would be remembered as a great president, "maybe even
alongside Washington and Lincoln," opining that Roosevelt "had every
quality that morons esteem in their heroes.""

The Wall Street Journal, 11 February 2009.

Joe Gwinn

Peter Ferrara, known as the "Payola Pundit" for his op-eds-for-pay deal
with
Jack Abramoff, is the guy who brought us the idea of privatizing Social
Security, among other ideology-driven blunders.

Don't put much stock in him, Joe. He's totally skewed the facts in that
op-ed, which is something he does all the time. More honest is Reagan's
chastened Budget Director, David Stockman, who said ""If the [Securities
and
Exchange Commission] had jurisdiction over the White House, we might have
all had time for a course in remedial economics at Allenwood
Penitentiary."

Except for Carter appointee Paul Volcker, Reagan's economists were a
greedy
and wacky bunch about whom, Stockman also said, "None of us really
understand what's going on with all these numbers."

The economic points about Reagan are that our recovery from stagflation
had
nothing to do with anything he or his crew did; it was done by Volcker's
policies, which were approved by Carter. And Reagan drove us into the
biggest national debt in peacetime history. Reagonomics, as an economic
philosophy, directly sowed the seeds of our current collapse.

--
Ed Huntress


You're right on target on this one. Reagonomics was not the ultra success
that his fawning followers wish it was. It's like when you read a story in a
newspaper about something you witnessed and you wonder how the reporter
could have gotten the facts so wrong. The reality of living through the
Reagan era as opposed to being too young to remember it or remembering it
like you wanted it to be are very different. Reagan was lucky to come along
right after a very hard economic period, brought about by the end of the
Vietnam War, that was starting to turn around just as he took office. It was
similar to Clinton's coming to the White House. The recession the first Bush
had was just coming to an end. Reagan's economic policies stunk. But as with
most things republicans do there is a period of early success before the
wheels fall off. Reagan didn't know jack about economics himself and the
people he relied on had crazy ideologies except for Volker. In Reagan's
economic policies the seeds of great debt were sowed. But as when anyone has
a credit card and spends freely it's pretty nice at first. Not so nice when
the bills come due. Lucky for Reagan he got to walk away when that happened.

Hawke

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
In article ,
"Ed Huntress" wrote:

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
The title says it all.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123431484726570949.html

The Wall Street Journal, 11 February 2009.

Joe Gwinn

Peter Ferrara, known as the "Payola Pundit" for his op-eds-for-pay deal
with
Jack Abramoff, is the guy who brought us the idea of privatizing Social
Security, among other ideology-driven blunders.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

Once you're an acknowledged journalistic whore, you can't salvage your
credibility by invoking Latin names for Greek philosophy. Guest
editorialists who don't acknowledge that they're being paid to promote a
certain opinion -- particularly if they identify their associations and
interests but fail to mention that they've been paid by another, interested
party for their words -- have screwed themselves.



Don't put much stock in him, Joe. He's totally skewed the facts in that
op-ed, which is something he does all the time. More honest is Reagan's
chastened Budget Director, David Stockman, who said ""If the [Securities
and
Exchange Commission] had jurisdiction over the White House, we might have
all had time for a course in remedial economics at Allenwood
Penitentiary."

Except for Carter appointee Paul Volcker, Reagan's economists were a
greedy
and wacky bunch about whom, Stockman also said, "None of us really
understand what's going on with all these numbers."

The economic points about Reagan are that our recovery from stagflation
had
nothing to do with anything he or his crew did; it was done by Volcker's
policies, which were approved by Carter. And Reagan drove us into the
biggest national debt in peacetime history. Reagonomics, as an economic
philosophy, directly sowed the seeds of our current collapse.

Ed, I really don't care if he's a running dog. Even saints can speak
untruths, even thieves can speak the truth. The problem is to tell
which is which.

Unless you have spent a great deal of time examining what Ferrara says, and
the counterarguments to it, all you have to go on is Ferrara's credibility.
In that regard, see above.


What points that he made would you dispute, and why?

sigh I figured you were going to make me do this. Okay, here goes:

CLAIM:

"In 1981, Reagan forced through Congress not only his famed, historic tax
cuts, but also a package of budget cuts
close to 5% of the federal budget -- equivalent to roughly $150 billion
today."

FACT:

They weren't budget cuts, they were budget increases. This is the result
Reagan's famed package, which he "forced through Congress":
http://research.stlouisfed.org/publi...an_Feb1989.pdf
(Figure 3, page 22)


CLAIM:

"Even with the Reagan defense buildup, which helped win the Cold War, total
federal spending declined to 21.2% of GDP
in 1989 from 23.5% of GDP in 1983. That's a real reduction of 10% in the
size of government relative to the economy.

FACT:

Misleading by cherry-picking dates. Reagan inherited a rate of 22.2%. He
promptly drove it up to 23.5%. Then it diddled around and settled at 21.2%.
It was lower under Carter (20.7%) and Clinton (around 19%).

http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/assets...s/hist01z2.xls

This occurred during a substantial increase in GDP, so the actual,
inflation-adjusted spending during his two terms went up a great deal, and
at a high rate:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2...GEXPND?cid=107


CLAIM:

"The fourth component of the Reagan recovery plan was tight, anti-inflation
monetary policy, which was spectacularly successful. Inflation was cut in
half to 6.2% in 1982 from 13.2% in 1980, and cut in half again to 3.2% in
1983."

Isn't that amazing? And all it took was the worst recession since the 1930s
to do it. g:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/fredgraph?s[1][id]=CPIAUCNS

I won't go into saving and investing, because the supply-side vampires have
twisted the data into such a knot that it would take us all day to show what
b.s.'ers they are, and you can see enough from the above to see what happens
when you expose their b.s. to the light of day and original-source data.

In sum, Reagan plowed some new ground with his program, turning the US into
an economics experiment that college sophomores could only dream of. For the
most part, it laid an egg. As the Fed's research department said (in a
report approved by Reagan appointees, in 1989):

"In 1981, the newly inaugurated Reagan administration formulated a budget
plan designed to slow the growth of government and boost incentives (via
taxes) to save, invest and work. Included in the projections was a movement
toward a balanced federal budget by 1986. The actual rise in the federal
deficit since 1981, culminating with a $221 billion deficit in 1986,
suggests that the Reagan budget program failed. Examination of the factors
contributing to the deficit as well as the composition of both outlays and
receipts, however, indicates broadly why this result occurred and points out
that there were a number of successes as well as failures when individual
components of the federal budget are considered."

Nothing much like what Ferrarra says, huh? He's a bull****ter, Joe, just
like most of the supply-siders. He isn't even very good at it, because far
more hopelessly entwined arguments have been made by the heavy hitters.
However, as I've learned from occasionally digging into their claims, they
all fold up like vampires when you shine a little sunlight on them.

Now, if you come back with another URL for some wacko's op-ed or article,
and it contains numbers, it's YOUR turn to go to the sources and document it
all, OK?

d8-)

--
Ed Huntress

In article ,
"Ed Huntress" wrote:

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
In article ,
"Ed Huntress" wrote:

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
The title says it all.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123431484726570949.html

The Wall Street Journal, 11 February 2009.

Joe Gwinn

Peter Ferrara, known as the "Payola Pundit" for his op-eds-for-pay deal
with
Jack Abramoff, is the guy who brought us the idea of privatizing Social
Security, among other ideology-driven blunders.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

Once you're an acknowledged journalistic whore, you can't salvage your
credibility by invoking Latin names for Greek philosophy. Guest
editorialists who don't acknowledge that they're being paid to promote a
certain opinion -- particularly if they identify their associations and
interests but fail to mention that they've been paid by another, interested
party for their words -- have screwed themselves.

I did google Ferrara, and found the story you allude to. But it isn't
Farrara who is making an ad hominem attack, it's Huntress.

The form of the argument is that X is a bad person so nothing X says can
be true. Non sequitur, no matter how bad X is.

Nor does it follow that because Y is good, that all that Y says is true.


Don't put much stock in him, Joe. He's totally skewed the facts in that
op-ed, which is something he does all the time. More honest is Reagan's
chastened Budget Director, David Stockman, who said ""If the [Securities and
Exchange Commission] had jurisdiction over the White House, we might have
all had time for a course in remedial economics at Allenwood
Penitentiary."

Except for Carter appointee Paul Volcker, Reagan's economists were a
greedy and wacky bunch about whom, Stockman also said, "None of us really
understand what's going on with all these numbers."

Isn't this true of economist in general, admitted or not? Not to
mention politicians?


The economic points about Reagan are that our recovery from stagflation had
nothing to do with anything he or his crew did; it was done by Volcker's
policies, which were approved by Carter. And Reagan drove us into the
biggest national debt in peacetime history. Reagonomics, as an economic
philosophy, directly sowed the seeds of our current collapse.

Ed, I really don't care if he's a running dog. Even saints can speak
untruths, even thieves can speak the truth. The problem is to tell
which is which.

Unless you have spent a great deal of time examining what Ferrara says, and
the counterarguments to it, all you have to go on is Ferrara's credibility.
In that regard, see above.

Appeal to authority is a weak argument, in either direction.

I would doubt that The Wall Street Journal is unaware of the Farrara's
connection with Abramoff.

I'll be watching the Letters to the Editor to see what reactions roll in.


What points that he made would you dispute, and why?

sigh I figured you were going to make me do this. Okay, here goes:

CLAIM:

"In 1981, Reagan forced through Congress not only his famed, historic tax
cuts, but also a package of budget cuts
close to 5% of the federal budget -- equivalent to roughly $150 billion
today."

FACT:

They weren't budget cuts, they were budget increases. This is the result
Reagan's famed package, which he "forced through Congress":
http://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/review/89/01/Budget_Jan_Feb1989.pdf
(Figure 3, page 22)

CLAIM:

"Even with the Reagan defense buildup, which helped win the Cold War, total
federal spending declined to 21.2% of GDP
in 1989 from 23.5% of GDP in 1983. That's a real reduction of 10% in the
size of government relative to the economy.

FACT:

Misleading by cherry-picking dates. Reagan inherited a rate of 22.2%. He
promptly drove it up to 23.5%. Then it diddled around and settled at 21.2%.
It was lower under Carter (20.7%) and Clinton (around 19%).

http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/assets/omb/budget/fy2009/sheets/hist01z2.xls

This occurred during a substantial increase in GDP, so the actual,
inflation-adjusted spending during his two terms went up a great deal, and
at a high rate:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/FGEXPND?cid=107


CLAIM:

"The fourth component of the Reagan recovery plan was tight, anti-inflation
monetary policy, which was spectacularly successful. Inflation was cut in
half to 6.2% in 1982 from 13.2% in 1980, and cut in half again to 3.2% in
1983."

Isn't that amazing? And all it took was the worst recession since the 1930s
to do it. g:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/fredgraph?s[1][id]=CPIAUCNS

I won't go into saving and investing, because the supply-side vampires have
twisted the data into such a knot that it would take us all day to show what
b.s.'ers they are, and you can see enough from the above to see what happens
when you expose their b.s. to the light of day and original-source data.

It will take me some time to digest your cites above.


In sum, Reagan plowed some new ground with his program, turning the US into
an economics experiment that college sophomores could only dream of. For the
most part, it laid an egg. As the Fed's research department said (in a
report approved by Reagan appointees, in 1989):

"In 1981, the newly inaugurated Reagan administration formulated a budget
plan designed to slow the growth of government and boost incentives (via
taxes) to save, invest and work. Included in the projections was a movement
toward a balanced federal budget by 1986. The actual rise in the federal
deficit since 1981, culminating with a $221 billion deficit in 1986,
suggests that the Reagan budget program failed. Examination of the factors
contributing to the deficit as well as the composition of both outlays and
receipts, however, indicates broadly why this result occurred and points out
that there were a number of successes as well as failures when individual
components of the federal budget are considered."

Which report? What's the URL? I'd like to see the context of the quote.


Nothing much like what Ferrarra says, huh? He's a bull****ter, Joe, just
like most of the supply-siders. He isn't even very good at it, because far
more hopelessly entwined arguments have been made by the heavy hitters.
However, as I've learned from occasionally digging into their claims, they
all fold up like vampires when you shine a little sunlight on them.

Now, if you come back with another URL for some wacko's op-ed or article,
and it contains numbers, it's YOUR turn to go to the sources and document it
all, OK?

You have more practice and far more time than I do, so I probably won't
even try to match you here.

But I don't buy that editorials in the WSJ are necessarily wacko.

The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times are the number one and
number two newspapers in the US, with circulations of two million and
one million respectively. (USA Today has larger circulation, but is not
playing in this league.)

It goes without saying that The Wall Street Journal and The New York
Times do not see eye to eye on many subjects, and when one says that the
editorial pages of one or the other are crazy, one is simply expressing
disagreement with their worldview and politics.

For balance, perhaps you should apply your considerable analytical
skills to editorials in the NYT. Or better, pairs of warring editorials
in the two papers.

Joe Gwinn

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
In article ,
"Ed Huntress" wrote:

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
In article ,
"Ed Huntress" wrote:

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
The title says it all.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123431484726570949.html

The Wall Street Journal, 11 February 2009.

Joe Gwinn

Peter Ferrara, known as the "Payola Pundit" for his op-eds-for-pay
deal
with
Jack Abramoff, is the guy who brought us the idea of privatizing
Social
Security, among other ideology-driven blunders.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

Once you're an acknowledged journalistic whore, you can't salvage your
credibility by invoking Latin names for Greek philosophy. Guest
editorialists who don't acknowledge that they're being paid to promote a
certain opinion -- particularly if they identify their associations and
interests but fail to mention that they've been paid by another,
interested
party for their words -- have screwed themselves.

I did google Ferrara, and found the story you allude to. But it isn't
Farrara who is making an ad hominem attack, it's Huntress.

You're letting the dictionary constrain your thinking, Joe. An "attack" on
the man in a debate is a flimsy, but often valid, logical fallacy (many
logical fallacies produce truthful results). But a case in which someone's
integrity is the primary imprimatur by which their assertions have validity
is one in which it's legitimate to question their record of integrity.

Since you didn't check Ferrara's facts, you were relying on his integrity,
and the procedures the WSJ uses to validate facts in their editorial pages.
I pointed out that Ferrara's integrity is known to be wanting, by his own
admission. And I could have told you that the WSJ doesn't make much effort
to validate anything said in their editorial pages. Neither do most other
newspapers or other news sources.


The form of the argument is that X is a bad person so nothing X says can
be true. Non sequitur, no matter how bad X is.

Nor does it follow that because Y is good, that all that Y says is true.

I know that, fer chrissake. I'm not commenting on the Aristotelian
fallacies. Aristotelian logic is a tool, not a straightjacket. It can tell
you when something is 100% likely to be true but it says NOTHING about
things that are 98% likely to be true. That's one of the two key weaknesses
in simple, deductive, Aristotelian logic. This is not my opinion, BTW.

I'm commenting on what you accept as validation for truth. And, as we
learned, you made the wrong assumptions. You assumed he was being accurate,
but he was not.



Don't put much stock in him, Joe. He's totally skewed the facts in
that
op-ed, which is something he does all the time. More honest is
Reagan's
chastened Budget Director, David Stockman, who said ""If the
[Securities and
Exchange Commission] had jurisdiction over the White House, we might
have
all had time for a course in remedial economics at Allenwood
Penitentiary."

Except for Carter appointee Paul Volcker, Reagan's economists were a
greedy and wacky bunch about whom, Stockman also said, "None of us
really
understand what's going on with all these numbers."

Isn't this true of economist in general, admitted or not? Not to
mention politicians?

No, not in general. Stockman was a schoolmate of mine. I never knew him
personally, but he was an ambitious and noisy one, and, given the times
(1966-68), his political views were off on a tangent. If you ever read his
book you know he was a little wacky. And Reagan agglomerated a really odd
mix of economists -- including, BTW, Paul Krugman -- who were all a'twitter
about ideology from the Austrian School. Krugman, a minor economist under
Reagan, had just finished his noteworthy work on the virtues of free trade,
and, although he was leftish, it fit in with the Chicago Univ. and Austrian
School types who fleshed out the team.

About the greed: I haven't seen anything about this for years, so I don't
remember the details, but they had enough background and connections with
the financial upper crust that it was no surprise that they thought
"trickle-down" economics was just ducky. They and their class got theirs
first. The rest of us got the crumbs that filtered down through the depths.
They really believed that stuff.



The economic points about Reagan are that our recovery from
stagflation had
nothing to do with anything he or his crew did; it was done by
Volcker's
policies, which were approved by Carter. And Reagan drove us into the
biggest national debt in peacetime history. Reagonomics, as an
economic
philosophy, directly sowed the seeds of our current collapse.

Ed, I really don't care if he's a running dog. Even saints can speak
untruths, even thieves can speak the truth. The problem is to tell
which is which.

Unless you have spent a great deal of time examining what Ferrara says,
and
the counterarguments to it, all you have to go on is Ferrara's
credibility.
In that regard, see above.

Appeal to authority is a weak argument, in either direction.

I would doubt that The Wall Street Journal is unaware of the Farrara's
connection with Abramoff.

I'll be watching the Letters to the Editor to see what reactions roll in.

Don't be surprised if nothing rolls in. How many people do you think make
the effort to check his facts? That's part of my trade. Not many people do
it.

The most you're likely to see is some grumbling.



What points that he made would you dispute, and why?

sigh I figured you were going to make me do this. Okay, here goes:

CLAIM:

"In 1981, Reagan forced through Congress not only his famed, historic tax
cuts, but also a package of budget cuts
close to 5% of the federal budget -- equivalent to roughly $150 billion
today."

FACT:

They weren't budget cuts, they were budget increases. This is the result
Reagan's famed package, which he "forced through Congress":
http://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/review/89/01/Budget_Jan_Feb1989.pdf
(Figure 3, page 22)

CLAIM:

"Even with the Reagan defense buildup, which helped win the Cold War,
total
federal spending declined to 21.2% of GDP
in 1989 from 23.5% of GDP in 1983. That's a real reduction of 10% in the
size of government relative to the economy.

FACT:

Misleading by cherry-picking dates. Reagan inherited a rate of 22.2%. He
promptly drove it up to 23.5%. Then it diddled around and settled at
21.2%.
It was lower under Carter (20.7%) and Clinton (around 19%).

http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/assets/omb/budget/fy2009/sheets/hist01z2.xls

This occurred during a substantial increase in GDP, so the actual,
inflation-adjusted spending during his two terms went up a great deal,
and
at a high rate:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/FGEXPND?cid=107


CLAIM:

"The fourth component of the Reagan recovery plan was tight,
anti-inflation
monetary policy, which was spectacularly successful. Inflation was cut in
half to 6.2% in 1982 from 13.2% in 1980, and cut in half again to 3.2% in
1983."

Isn't that amazing? And all it took was the worst recession since the
1930s
to do it. g:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/fredgraph?s[1][id]=CPIAUCNS

I won't go into saving and investing, because the supply-side vampires
have
twisted the data into such a knot that it would take us all day to show
what
b.s.'ers they are, and you can see enough from the above to see what
happens
when you expose their b.s. to the light of day and original-source data.

It will take me some time to digest your cites above.

Take all the time you want. g



In sum, Reagan plowed some new ground with his program, turning the US
into
an economics experiment that college sophomores could only dream of. For
the
most part, it laid an egg. As the Fed's research department said (in a
report approved by Reagan appointees, in 1989):

"In 1981, the newly inaugurated Reagan administration formulated a budget
plan designed to slow the growth of government and boost incentives (via
taxes) to save, invest and work. Included in the projections was a
movement
toward a balanced federal budget by 1986. The actual rise in the federal
deficit since 1981, culminating with a $221 billion deficit in 1986,
suggests that the Reagan budget program failed. Examination of the
factors
contributing to the deficit as well as the composition of both outlays
and
receipts, however, indicates broadly why this result occurred and points
out
that there were a number of successes as well as failures when individual
components of the federal budget are considered."

Which report? What's the URL? I'd like to see the context of the quote.

"Federal Budget Trends and the 1981 Reagan Economic Plan," St. Louis Federal
Reserve research dept., 1989, pp. 27-28.

http://research.stlouisfed.org/publi...an_Feb1989.pdf



Nothing much like what Ferrarra says, huh? He's a bull****ter, Joe, just
like most of the supply-siders. He isn't even very good at it, because
far
more hopelessly entwined arguments have been made by the heavy hitters.
However, as I've learned from occasionally digging into their claims,
they
all fold up like vampires when you shine a little sunlight on them.

Now, if you come back with another URL for some wacko's op-ed or article,
and it contains numbers, it's YOUR turn to go to the sources and document
it
all, OK?

You have more practice and far more time than I do, so I probably won't
even try to match you here.

It's not fair of me, I know, but I do my best to be fair and accurate when I
go off like I did above. In this case, I'm not trying to give a balanced
analysis of Reagonomics (not that I could, anyway), but only to counter
Ferrara's misrepresentations. That was the issue, and my complaint.

I realize that most people don't have the experience to do it quickly enough
to be practical. Let me temper the whole thing by saying there is more to
Reagonomics than Ferrara is claiming or that I am reporting, to which I
tried to give some balance by quoting from the Fed's analysis, above. As
they say, there were successes, and there were failures. These things are
almost never black and white, but Ferrara was implying as much.

If you want to get into Reagonomics in depth, I hope you'll find someone to
discuss it with. g I'm not game for that. It's a career, not a discussion.


But I don't buy that editorials in the WSJ are necessarily wacko.

They aren't. But the WSJ has always gone for the provocative writers, and
their editorials are rightish, so you get rightish provocative writers. Any
polarized and provocative editorialists are likely to be selective
polemicists, not objective reporters.


The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times are the number one and
number two newspapers in the US, with circulations of two million and
one million respectively. (USA Today has larger circulation, but is not
playing in this league.)

It goes without saying that The Wall Street Journal and The New York
Times do not see eye to eye on many subjects, and when one says that the
editorial pages of one or the other are crazy, one is simply expressing
disagreement with their worldview and politics.

I'm not The New York Times. It isn't they who are saying the WSJ's
editorialists are often wacky. It's me saying that. d8-)


For balance, perhaps you should apply your considerable analytical
skills to editorials in the NYT. Or better, pairs of warring editorials
in the two papers.

As they used to say on a TV show, that's your assignment, should you choose
to take it. I don't do the NYT. But if you choose to, you'll find plenty of
material. Their editorialists are among the best, but they aren't
invulnerable. Thomas Friedman, for example, can often be dissected like a
frying chicken if you're so disposed. The same applies to some of Bob
Herbert's editorials. And Maureen Dowd often is just going for laughs. David
Brooks often seems to like hearing himself think, no matter what he's
thinking about at the moment.

But the WSJ editorials are somewhat nuttier, IMO. Supply-side economics
requires a fairly extreme willingness to believe.

--
Ed Huntress

In article ,
"Ed Huntress" wrote:

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
In article ,
"Ed Huntress" wrote:

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
In article ,
"Ed Huntress" wrote:

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
The title says it all.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123431484726570949.html

The Wall Street Journal, 11 February 2009.

Joe Gwinn

Peter Ferrara, known as the "Payola Pundit" for his op-eds-for-pay
deal
with
Jack Abramoff, is the guy who brought us the idea of privatizing
Social
Security, among other ideology-driven blunders.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

Once you're an acknowledged journalistic whore, you can't salvage your
credibility by invoking Latin names for Greek philosophy. Guest
editorialists who don't acknowledge that they're being paid to promote a
certain opinion -- particularly if they identify their associations and
interests but fail to mention that they've been paid by another,
interested
party for their words -- have screwed themselves.

I did google Ferrara, and found the story you allude to. But it isn't
Farrara who is making an ad hominem attack, it's Huntress.

You're letting the dictionary constrain your thinking, Joe. An "attack" on
the man in a debate is a flimsy, but often valid, logical fallacy (many
logical fallacies produce truthful results). But a case in which someone's
integrity is the primary imprimatur by which their assertions have validity
is one in which it's legitimate to question their record of integrity.

Umm. Huntress did attack the man, not his argument.


Since you didn't check Ferrara's facts, you were relying on his integrity,
and the procedures the WSJ uses to validate facts in their editorial pages.
I pointed out that Ferrara's integrity is known to be wanting, by his own
admission. And I could have told you that the WSJ doesn't make much effort
to validate anything said in their editorial pages. Neither do most other
newspapers or other news sources.

It's the opinion section. I suspect that this is a lumper versus
splitter argument. Ferrara is making a grand sweep argument, which of
necessity rides rough over many a detail. In the real world, no grand
sweep argument ever perfectly fits the known facts, for a multitude of
reasons. This does not prove that the grand sweep is wrong; a grander
disproof is required.


The form of the argument is that X is a bad person so nothing X says can
be true. Non sequitur, no matter how bad X is.

Nor does it follow that because Y is good, that all that Y says is true.

I know that, fer chrissake. I'm not commenting on the Aristotelian
fallacies. Aristotelian logic is a tool, not a straightjacket. It can tell
you when something is 100% likely to be true but it says NOTHING about
things that are 98% likely to be true. That's one of the two key weaknesses
in simple, deductive, Aristotelian logic. This is not my opinion, BTW.

I'm commenting on what you accept as validation for truth. And, as we
learned, you made the wrong assumptions. You assumed he was being accurate,
but he was not.

So, stop making ad hominem arguments. There are better arguments.

I did not assume that Ferrara was accurate. I assumed only that his
thesis was interesting. And it certainly has generated debate.


Don't put much stock in him, Joe. He's totally skewed the facts in
that
op-ed, which is something he does all the time. More honest is
Reagan's
chastened Budget Director, David Stockman, who said ""If the
[Securities and
Exchange Commission] had jurisdiction over the White House, we might
have
all had time for a course in remedial economics at Allenwood
Penitentiary."

Except for Carter appointee Paul Volcker, Reagan's economists were a
greedy and wacky bunch about whom, Stockman also said, "None of us
really
understand what's going on with all these numbers."

Isn't this true of economist in general, admitted or not? Not to
mention politicians?

No, not in general. Stockman was a schoolmate of mine. I never knew him
personally, but he was an ambitious and noisy one, and, given the times
(1966-68), his political views were off on a tangent. If you ever read his
book you know he was a little wacky. And Reagan agglomerated a really odd
mix of economists -- including, BTW, Paul Krugman -- who were all a'twitter
about ideology from the Austrian School. Krugman, a minor economist under
Reagan, had just finished his noteworthy work on the virtues of free trade,
and, although he was leftish, it fit in with the Chicago Univ. and Austrian
School types who fleshed out the team.

If you believe that Stockman is wacky, why quote him as an authority?


About the greed: I haven't seen anything about this for years, so I don't
remember the details, but they had enough background and connections with
the financial upper crust that it was no surprise that they thought
"trickle-down" economics was just ducky. They and their class got theirs
first. The rest of us got the crumbs that filtered down through the depths.
They really believed that stuff.

I have a more general problem with greed as an explanation for anything:
People have always been greedy, and always will be, so greed cannot be
the explanation for much of anything. If greed were the answer, why
didn't bad thing happen years earlier, rather than time of most
recent explosion?

More generally, the whole point of Adam Smith is the harnessing of greed
to the common good.


The economic points about Reagan are that our recovery from
stagflation had
nothing to do with anything he or his crew did; it was done by
Volcker's
policies, which were approved by Carter. And Reagan drove us into the
biggest national debt in peacetime history. Reagonomics, as an
economic
philosophy, directly sowed the seeds of our current collapse.

Ed, I really don't care if he's a running dog. Even saints can speak
untruths, even thieves can speak the truth. The problem is to tell
which is which.

Unless you have spent a great deal of time examining what Ferrara says,
and the counterarguments to it, all you have to go on is Ferrara's
credibility.
In that regard, see above.

Appeal to authority is a weak argument, in either direction.

I would doubt that The Wall Street Journal is unaware of the Farrara's
connection with Abramoff.

I'll be watching the Letters to the Editor to see what reactions roll in.

Don't be surprised if nothing rolls in. How many people do you think make
the effort to check his facts? That's part of my trade. Not many people do
it.

The most you're likely to see is some grumbling.

Perhaps. The next few days should tell.


What points that he made would you dispute, and why?

sigh I figured you were going to make me do this. Okay, here goes:

CLAIM:

"In 1981, Reagan forced through Congress not only his famed, historic tax
cuts, but also a package of budget cuts
close to 5% of the federal budget -- equivalent to roughly $150 billion
today."

FACT:

They weren't budget cuts, they were budget increases. This is the result
Reagan's famed package, which he "forced through Congress":
http://research.stlouisfed.org/publi...get_Jan_Feb198
9.pdf
(Figure 3, page 22)

CLAIM:

"Even with the Reagan defense buildup, which helped win the Cold War,
total
federal spending declined to 21.2% of GDP
in 1989 from 23.5% of GDP in 1983. That's a real reduction of 10% in the
size of government relative to the economy.

FACT:

Misleading by cherry-picking dates. Reagan inherited a rate of 22.2%. He
promptly drove it up to 23.5%. Then it diddled around and settled at
21.2%.
It was lower under Carter (20.7%) and Clinton (around 19%).

http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/assets...s/hist01z2.xls


This occurred during a substantial increase in GDP, so the actual,
inflation-adjusted spending during his two terms went up a great deal,
and
at a high rate:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/FGEXPND?cid=107


CLAIM:

"The fourth component of the Reagan recovery plan was tight,
anti-inflation
monetary policy, which was spectacularly successful. Inflation was cut in
half to 6.2% in 1982 from 13.2% in 1980, and cut in half again to 3.2% in
1983."

Isn't that amazing? And all it took was the worst recession since the
1930s
to do it. g:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/fredgraph?s[1][id]=CPIAUCNS

I won't go into saving and investing, because the supply-side vampires
have
twisted the data into such a knot that it would take us all day to show
what
b.s.'ers they are, and you can see enough from the above to see what
happens
when you expose their b.s. to the light of day and original-source data.

It will take me some time to digest your cites above.

Take all the time you want. g

I shall. Pentagrid (RPC issues) is ahead of this issue in line.


In sum, Reagan plowed some new ground with his program, turning the US
into
an economics experiment that college sophomores could only dream of. For
the
most part, it laid an egg. As the Fed's research department said (in a
report approved by Reagan appointees, in 1989):

"In 1981, the newly inaugurated Reagan administration formulated a budget
plan designed to slow the growth of government and boost incentives (via
taxes) to save, invest and work. Included in the projections was a
movement
toward a balanced federal budget by 1986. The actual rise in the federal
deficit since 1981, culminating with a $221 billion deficit in 1986,
suggests that the Reagan budget program failed. Examination of the
factors
contributing to the deficit as well as the composition of both outlays
and
receipts, however, indicates broadly why this result occurred and points
out
that there were a number of successes as well as failures when individual
components of the federal budget are considered."

Which report? What's the URL? I'd like to see the context of the quote.

"Federal Budget Trends and the 1981 Reagan Economic Plan," St. Louis Federal
Reserve research dept., 1989, pp. 27-28.

http://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/review/89/01/Budget_Jan_Feb1989.pdf

Thanks.


Nothing much like what Ferrarra says, huh? He's a bull****ter, Joe, just
like most of the supply-siders. He isn't even very good at it, because
far
more hopelessly entwined arguments have been made by the heavy hitters.
However, as I've learned from occasionally digging into their claims,
they all fold up like vampires when you shine a little sunlight on them.

Now, if you come back with another URL for some wacko's op-ed or article,
and it contains numbers, it's YOUR turn to go to the sources and document
it all, OK?

You have more practice and far more time than I do, so I probably won't
even try to match you here.

It's not fair of me, I know, but I do my best to be fair and accurate when I
go off like I did above. In this case, I'm not trying to give a balanced
analysis of Reagonomics (not that I could, anyway), but only to counter
Ferrara's misrepresentations. That was the issue, and my complaint.

Now, you do know that the issue is the level of balance of the analyst
in question. If the analyst isn't well balanced, wacko results are
likely, and the harder the analyst works the stranger the result. And
the analyst will never know, because it fits his unbalance. Present
company excluded, of course.


I realize that most people don't have the experience to do it quickly enough
to be practical. Let me temper the whole thing by saying there is more to
Reagonomics than Ferrara is claiming or that I am reporting, to which I
tried to give some balance by quoting from the Fed's analysis, above. As
they say, there were successes, and there were failures. These things are
almost never black and white, but Ferrara was implying as much.

If you want to get into Reagonomics in depth, I hope you'll find someone to
discuss it with. g I'm not game for that. It's a career, not a discussion.

The key issue is time. Experience helps to make the research more
efficient, but still it comes back to time. It may be unfair, but
people are not convinced when presented with a pile of stuff that it's
impractical for them to check.


But I don't buy that editorials in the WSJ are necessarily wacko.

They aren't. But the WSJ has always gone for the provocative writers, and
their editorials are rightish, so you get rightish provocative writers. Any
polarized and provocative editorialists are likely to be selective
polemicists, not objective reporters.

And the NYT writers are paragons of rationality, free of all bias and
cant.


The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times are the number one and
number two newspapers in the US, with circulations of two million and
one million respectively. (USA Today has larger circulation, but is not
playing in this league.)

It goes without saying that The Wall Street Journal and The New York
Times do not see eye to eye on many subjects, and when one says that the
editorial pages of one or the other are crazy, one is simply expressing
disagreement with their worldview and politics.

I'm not The New York Times. It isn't they who are saying the WSJ's
editorialists are often wacky. It's me saying that. d8-)

Umm. Let's say that you sound a lot more like the NYT than the WSJ.
And you live close enough to NYC to be in their reality distortion
field. Guilt by propinquity. Is there a problem with this?


For balance, perhaps you should apply your considerable analytical
skills to editorials in the NYT. Or better, pairs of warring editorials
in the two papers.

As they used to say on a TV show, that's your assignment, should you choose
to take it.

Umm. It was "mission". And then the tape self destructed.


I don't do the NYT. But if you choose to, you'll find plenty of
material. Their editorialists are among the best, but they aren't
invulnerable. Thomas Friedman, for example, can often be dissected like a
frying chicken if you're so disposed. The same applies to some of Bob
Herbert's editorials. And Maureen Dowd often is just going for laughs. David
Brooks often seems to like hearing himself think, no matter what he's
thinking about at the moment.

But the WSJ editorials are somewhat nuttier, IMO. Supply-side economics
requires a fairly extreme willingness to believe.

Well, I find the NYT editorials to be the nuttier. Well, naive. As I
said, it depends on one's worldview and politics.

Joe Gwinn

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
In article ,
"Ed Huntress" wrote:

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
In article ,
"Ed Huntress" wrote:

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
In article ,
"Ed Huntress" wrote:

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
The title says it all.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123431484726570949.html

The Wall Street Journal, 11 February 2009.

Joe Gwinn

Peter Ferrara, known as the "Payola Pundit" for his op-eds-for-pay
deal
with
Jack Abramoff, is the guy who brought us the idea of privatizing
Social
Security, among other ideology-driven blunders.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

Once you're an acknowledged journalistic whore, you can't salvage your
credibility by invoking Latin names for Greek philosophy. Guest
editorialists who don't acknowledge that they're being paid to promote
a
certain opinion -- particularly if they identify their associations
and
interests but fail to mention that they've been paid by another,
interested
party for their words -- have screwed themselves.

I did google Ferrara, and found the story you allude to. But it isn't
Farrara who is making an ad hominem attack, it's Huntress.

You're letting the dictionary constrain your thinking, Joe. An "attack"
on
the man in a debate is a flimsy, but often valid, logical fallacy (many
logical fallacies produce truthful results). But a case in which
someone's
integrity is the primary imprimatur by which their assertions have
validity
is one in which it's legitimate to question their record of integrity.

Umm. Huntress did attack the man, not his argument.

Hey, Joe, I said the guy has a bad reputation for integrity in what he
writes. Then I demonstrated it by checking his facts and finding they were
less than truthful.

If you weren't going to check the facts, why did you think enough of the
editorial to post it here in the first place? What was the basis on which
you judged its veracity? Or did you not care whether it was truthful or not?



Since you didn't check Ferrara's facts, you were relying on his
integrity,
and the procedures the WSJ uses to validate facts in their editorial
pages.
I pointed out that Ferrara's integrity is known to be wanting, by his own
admission. And I could have told you that the WSJ doesn't make much
effort
to validate anything said in their editorial pages. Neither do most other
newspapers or other news sources.

It's the opinion section. I suspect that this is a lumper versus
splitter argument. Ferrara is making a grand sweep argument, which of
necessity rides rough over many a detail.

Bull. As I pointed out, it flat-out contradicts the facts.

In the real world, no grand
sweep argument ever perfectly fits the known facts, for a multitude of
reasons. This does not prove that the grand sweep is wrong; a grander
disproof is required.

When I find that a writer misrepresents the facts, I conclude that his
"grand sweep argument" is more likely than not to be a bunch of bull. If you
make an argument and it's derived from invalid or misrepresented data, what
does that say about the strength of your "argument"?

It looks like you're practicing apologia here for Ferrarra's phony argument.
Casuistry is a fine art, Joe. It takes years of training in a monestary or a
conservative think tank to be good at standing the truth on its head and
making it sound believable. Ferrara has had more practice at it than most.
g



The form of the argument is that X is a bad person so nothing X says
can
be true. Non sequitur, no matter how bad X is.

Nor does it follow that because Y is good, that all that Y says is
true.

I know that, fer chrissake. I'm not commenting on the Aristotelian
fallacies. Aristotelian logic is a tool, not a straightjacket. It can
tell
you when something is 100% likely to be true but it says NOTHING about
things that are 98% likely to be true. That's one of the two key
weaknesses
in simple, deductive, Aristotelian logic. This is not my opinion, BTW.

I'm commenting on what you accept as validation for truth. And, as we
learned, you made the wrong assumptions. You assumed he was being
accurate,
but he was not.

So, stop making ad hominem arguments. There are better arguments.

Let's see your better argument opposing or favoring Ferrara's editorial,
then. So far, you haven't offered one. And there's no way you can evaluate
his argument without knowing if his facts are right. If you aren't going to
investigate it, all you have to go on is what almost all of us do almost all
of the time with such arguments: judge on the basis of what you know about
the integrity and ability of the one making the claim.


I did not assume that Ferrara was accurate. I assumed only that his
thesis was interesting.

Twisted statistics, in the hands of a practiced prevaricator, can be very
interesting indeed.

And it certainly has generated debate.

No it hasn't. Where is the debate about his thesis? The only debate is over
how you evaluate a polemic if you don't know whether it's based on honest
facts.



Don't put much stock in him, Joe. He's totally skewed the facts in
that
op-ed, which is something he does all the time. More honest is
Reagan's
chastened Budget Director, David Stockman, who said ""If the
[Securities and
Exchange Commission] had jurisdiction over the White House, we
might
have
all had time for a course in remedial economics at Allenwood
Penitentiary."

Except for Carter appointee Paul Volcker, Reagan's economists were
a
greedy and wacky bunch about whom, Stockman also said, "None of us
really
understand what's going on with all these numbers."

Isn't this true of economist in general, admitted or not? Not to
mention politicians?

No, not in general. Stockman was a schoolmate of mine. I never knew him
personally, but he was an ambitious and noisy one, and, given the times
(1966-68), his political views were off on a tangent. If you ever read
his
book you know he was a little wacky. And Reagan agglomerated a really odd
mix of economists -- including, BTW, Paul Krugman -- who were all
a'twitter
about ideology from the Austrian School. Krugman, a minor economist under
Reagan, had just finished his noteworthy work on the virtues of free
trade,
and, although he was leftish, it fit in with the Chicago Univ. and
Austrian
School types who fleshed out the team.

If you believe that Stockman is wacky, why quote him as an authority?

Not as an authority. The quotes, along with the rest of his book, _The
Triumph of Politics..._, show he was a bit of a wack job. And he was the
brains behind key elements of Reaganomics.



About the greed: I haven't seen anything about this for years, so I don't
remember the details, but they had enough background and connections with
the financial upper crust that it was no surprise that they thought
"trickle-down" economics was just ducky. They and their class got theirs
first. The rest of us got the crumbs that filtered down through the
depths.
They really believed that stuff.

I have a more general problem with greed as an explanation for anything:
People have always been greedy, and always will be, so greed cannot be
the explanation for much of anything. If greed were the answer, why
didn't bad thing happen years earlier, rather than time of most
recent explosion?

Because these people were particularly shameless about it.


More generally, the whole point of Adam Smith is the harnessing of greed
to the common good.

My edition of _Wealth of Nations_ runs 1,072 pages, and it contains a lot of
cautions about greed, and comments that Smith made about the necessity to
control it. The general point that Smith made, and which most people never
read or forgot, is that the benefits are derived from ENLIGHTENED
self-interest. Unlike Smith, Alan Greenspan thought that the enlightenment
part came naturally and automatically. Obviously, as he has since said
himself, Greenspan was wrong.

Likewise, assuming that the self-interest of government officials and
advisors can be counted on to be "enlightened" proved to be a misplaced
faith during the Reagan and Bush 43 administrations. You can call it a
matter of culture, or of character, but it seems to matter what philosophy
and ethics the officials and advisors bring with them to the job.



The economic points about Reagan are that our recovery from
stagflation had
nothing to do with anything he or his crew did; it was done by
Volcker's
policies, which were approved by Carter. And Reagan drove us into
the
biggest national debt in peacetime history. Reagonomics, as an
economic
philosophy, directly sowed the seeds of our current collapse.

Ed, I really don't care if he's a running dog. Even saints can
speak
untruths, even thieves can speak the truth. The problem is to tell
which is which.

Unless you have spent a great deal of time examining what Ferrara
says,
and the counterarguments to it, all you have to go on is Ferrara's
credibility.
In that regard, see above.

Appeal to authority is a weak argument, in either direction.

I would doubt that The Wall Street Journal is unaware of the Farrara's
connection with Abramoff.

I'll be watching the Letters to the Editor to see what reactions roll
in.

Don't be surprised if nothing rolls in. How many people do you think make
the effort to check his facts? That's part of my trade. Not many people
do
it.

The most you're likely to see is some grumbling.

Perhaps. The next few days should tell.


What points that he made would you dispute, and why?

sigh I figured you were going to make me do this. Okay, here goes:

CLAIM:

"In 1981, Reagan forced through Congress not only his famed, historic
tax
cuts, but also a package of budget cuts
close to 5% of the federal budget -- equivalent to roughly $150
billion
today."

FACT:

They weren't budget cuts, they were budget increases. This is the
result
Reagan's famed package, which he "forced through Congress":
http://research.stlouisfed.org/publi...get_Jan_Feb198
9.pdf
(Figure 3, page 22)

CLAIM:

"Even with the Reagan defense buildup, which helped win the Cold War,
total
federal spending declined to 21.2% of GDP
in 1989 from 23.5% of GDP in 1983. That's a real reduction of 10% in
the
size of government relative to the economy.

FACT:

Misleading by cherry-picking dates. Reagan inherited a rate of 22.2%.
He
promptly drove it up to 23.5%. Then it diddled around and settled at
21.2%.
It was lower under Carter (20.7%) and Clinton (around 19%).

http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/assets...s/hist01z2.xls


This occurred during a substantial increase in GDP, so the actual,
inflation-adjusted spending during his two terms went up a great deal,
and
at a high rate:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/FGEXPND?cid=107


CLAIM:

"The fourth component of the Reagan recovery plan was tight,
anti-inflation
monetary policy, which was spectacularly successful. Inflation was cut
in
half to 6.2% in 1982 from 13.2% in 1980, and cut in half again to 3.2%
in
1983."

Isn't that amazing? And all it took was the worst recession since the
1930s
to do it. g:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/fredgraph?s[1][id]=CPIAUCNS

I won't go into saving and investing, because the supply-side vampires
have
twisted the data into such a knot that it would take us all day to
show
what
b.s.'ers they are, and you can see enough from the above to see what
happens
when you expose their b.s. to the light of day and original-source
data.

It will take me some time to digest your cites above.

Take all the time you want. g

I shall. Pentagrid (RPC issues) is ahead of this issue in line.


In sum, Reagan plowed some new ground with his program, turning the US
into
an economics experiment that college sophomores could only dream of.
For
the
most part, it laid an egg. As the Fed's research department said (in a
report approved by Reagan appointees, in 1989):

"In 1981, the newly inaugurated Reagan administration formulated a
budget
plan designed to slow the growth of government and boost incentives
(via
taxes) to save, invest and work. Included in the projections was a
movement
toward a balanced federal budget by 1986. The actual rise in the
federal
deficit since 1981, culminating with a $221 billion deficit in 1986,
suggests that the Reagan budget program failed. Examination of the
factors
contributing to the deficit as well as the composition of both outlays
and
receipts, however, indicates broadly why this result occurred and
points
out
that there were a number of successes as well as failures when
individual
components of the federal budget are considered."

Which report? What's the URL? I'd like to see the context of the
quote.

"Federal Budget Trends and the 1981 Reagan Economic Plan," St. Louis
Federal
Reserve research dept., 1989, pp. 27-28.

http://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/review/89/01/Budget_Jan_Feb1989.pdf

Thanks.


Nothing much like what Ferrarra says, huh? He's a bull****ter, Joe,
just
like most of the supply-siders. He isn't even very good at it, because
far
more hopelessly entwined arguments have been made by the heavy
hitters.
However, as I've learned from occasionally digging into their claims,
they all fold up like vampires when you shine a little sunlight on
them.

Now, if you come back with another URL for some wacko's op-ed or
article,
and it contains numbers, it's YOUR turn to go to the sources and
document
it all, OK?

You have more practice and far more time than I do, so I probably won't
even try to match you here.

It's not fair of me, I know, but I do my best to be fair and accurate
when I
go off like I did above. In this case, I'm not trying to give a balanced
analysis of Reagonomics (not that I could, anyway), but only to counter
Ferrara's misrepresentations. That was the issue, and my complaint.

Now, you do know that the issue is the level of balance of the analyst
in question. If the analyst isn't well balanced, wacko results are
likely, and the harder the analyst works the stranger the result. And
the analyst will never know, because it fits his unbalance. Present
company excluded, of course.

Aren't you the guy who just said not to argue about the man, but about the
argument itself? If your issue is whether the analyst is "well balanced,"
how would you know unless you do an in-depth analysis of his analysis? d8-)

There are analysts worth listening to, and those who are not. We can't
double-check everything we read. So we apply our background knowledge about
the one making the claims, unless we have reason to make a larger effort.

It's a lot like Jesse Jackson's statement to the effect that he feels safer
encountering a group of young white boys on a dark street than encountering
a group of young black boys. We stereotype, we make judgments based on scant
knowledge -- and if we didn't, we couldn't survive as a species. It's too
bad, but that's humans for you.

As for balance in analysis, that's what an education is supposed to teach
us. Unfortunately, that system is breaking down.



I realize that most people don't have the experience to do it quickly
enough
to be practical. Let me temper the whole thing by saying there is more to
Reagonomics than Ferrara is claiming or that I am reporting, to which I
tried to give some balance by quoting from the Fed's analysis, above. As
they say, there were successes, and there were failures. These things are
almost never black and white, but Ferrara was implying as much.

If you want to get into Reagonomics in depth, I hope you'll find someone
to
discuss it with. g I'm not game for that. It's a career, not a
discussion.

The key issue is time. Experience helps to make the research more
efficient, but still it comes back to time. It may be unfair, but
people are not convinced when presented with a pile of stuff that it's
impractical for them to check.

Don't tell that to some individuals here. They often don't even check the
stuff they present. Those cites that haven't had broken links for the past
two years often are about a subject that isn't even related. g

You can count on that never happening with any references I post. If I post
it, I've read it -- and it says what I claim it says. In this case, I culled
out three or four good references for every one I left, because they were
just duplicative, or they were buried in arcane analyses, or they didn't add
anything crucial to my point.



But I don't buy that editorials in the WSJ are necessarily wacko.

They aren't. But the WSJ has always gone for the provocative writers, and
their editorials are rightish, so you get rightish provocative writers.
Any
polarized and provocative editorialists are likely to be selective
polemicists, not objective reporters.

And the NYT writers are paragons of rationality, free of all bias and
cant.

Not at all. But they don't often cite phony facts. And they're much better
writers.



The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times are the number one and
number two newspapers in the US, with circulations of two million and
one million respectively. (USA Today has larger circulation, but is
not
playing in this league.)

It goes without saying that The Wall Street Journal and The New York
Times do not see eye to eye on many subjects, and when one says that
the
editorial pages of one or the other are crazy, one is simply expressing
disagreement with their worldview and politics.

I'm not The New York Times. It isn't they who are saying the WSJ's
editorialists are often wacky. It's me saying that. d8-)

Umm. Let's say that you sound a lot more like the NYT than the WSJ.
And you live close enough to NYC to be in their reality distortion
field. Guilt by propinquity. Is there a problem with this?

Which propinquity? You DO know where the Wall Street Journal is published,
right? d8-)

I've commented before that the WSJ's reporting has always been first class.
And if you think the WSJ's editorials are well-regarded by people who follow
it closely, even those of the rightist persuasion, you simply don't know the
publishing industry.

For one small example, Bill Kristol, neocon extraordinaire, who doesn't like
Rush Limbaugh because Rush is full of lies and crap, says Limbaugh is
"almost a Wall Street Journal editorial page of the airwaves." g

The consensus is that the WSJ's reporting is among the best, and that their
editorials, including staff-written ones but also op-eds, are junk, full of
half-truths and distorted data. The two departments are separated by a
virtual brick wall. The reporters used to call the editorial department "the
Nazis."

You seem to be taking the position that Larry takes about politicians:
they're all equally guilty, biased, distorted, or whatever. Baloney. Former
Reagan speech writer and Washington Times editorial-page editor Tony
Blanckley put it best in the editorial I quoted in another thread: the Times
is simply the most reliably accurate new source in the world. That's why
righties hate it so much: it leans leftish, and everybody who has major
political or financial consequence knows that it's more accurate than any of
its opponents.



For balance, perhaps you should apply your considerable analytical
skills to editorials in the NYT. Or better, pairs of warring
editorials
in the two papers.

As they used to say on a TV show, that's your assignment, should you
choose
to take it.

Umm. It was "mission". And then the tape self destructed.


I don't do the NYT. But if you choose to, you'll find plenty of
material. Their editorialists are among the best, but they aren't
invulnerable. Thomas Friedman, for example, can often be dissected like a
frying chicken if you're so disposed. The same applies to some of Bob
Herbert's editorials. And Maureen Dowd often is just going for laughs.
David
Brooks often seems to like hearing himself think, no matter what he's
thinking about at the moment.

But the WSJ editorials are somewhat nuttier, IMO. Supply-side economics
requires a fairly extreme willingness to believe.

Well, I find the NYT editorials to be the nuttier. Well, naive. As I
said, it depends on one's worldview and politics.

Not really. It depends mostly on whether you check their facts. If you do,
the equivocation quickly evaporates.

There are no shortcuts to uncovering the truth about things like that. You
either do the work and dig for the facts, or you have to fall back on your
personal prejudices.

--
Ed Huntress

On Tue, 17 Feb 2009 11:39:44 -0500, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:

snip
Aren't you the guy who just said not to argue about the man, but about the
argument itself? If your issue is whether the analyst is "well balanced,"
how would you know unless you do an in-depth analysis of his analysis? d8-)
snip
-------------
Not all arguments/opinions are created equal.

While it is most likely correct not to argue about the person, it
is useful to know their reputation, bias and historical accuracy,
and weight/value the opinions accordingly.

One of the worst faults is the "opinion for hire," as it is
difficult to impossible to tell if the views expressed are what
they think or what they were paid to write. "Sophistry," the
ability to argue either side of an issue for a price, was not
highly regarded in classical times, and should not be valued
hightly today.

==========
snip
Plato is largely responsible for the modern view of the "sophist"
as a greedy instructor who uses rhetorical sleight-of-hand and
ambiguities of language in order to deceive, or to support
fallacious reasoning. In this view, the sophist is not concerned
with truth and justice, but instead seeks power. Socrates, Plato,
and Aristotle all challenged the philosophical foundations of
sophism.

snip

Modern usage

In modern usage, sophism, sophist, and sophistry are derogatory
terms, due the influence of many philosophers in the past
(sophism and platonism were enemy schools).

A sophism is taken as a specious argument used for deceiving
someone. It might be crafted to seem logical while actually being
wrong, or it might use difficult words and complicated sentences
to intimidate the audience into agreeing, or it might appeal to
the audience's prejudices and emotions rather than logic, i.e.
raising doubts towards the one asserting, rather than his
assertion. The goal of a sophism is often to make the audience
believe the writer or speaker to be smarter than he or she
actually is, e.g., accusing another of sophistry for using
persuasion techniques. An argument Ad Hominem is an example of
Sophistry.
snip
----------------
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophism

Of course an honest Ideologue can be [and frequently is] a
disaster too, again showing the vital necessity to periodically
review the effect of what you are doing rather than simply trying
again, harder, harder. [see Hoffer's "The True Believer"]
http://www.amazon.com/True-Believer-.../dp/0060916125


Unka' George [George McDuffee]
-------------------------------------------
He that will not apply new remedies,
must expect new evils:
for Time is the greatest innovator: and
if Time, of course, alter things to the worse,
and wisdom and counsel shall not alter them to the better,
what shall be the end?

Francis Bacon (1561-1626), English philosopher, essayist, statesman.
Essays, "Of Innovations" (1597-1625).

"F. George McDuffee" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 17 Feb 2009 11:39:44 -0500, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:

snip
Aren't you the guy who just said not to argue about the man, but about the
argument itself? If your issue is whether the analyst is "well balanced,"
how would you know unless you do an in-depth analysis of his analysis?
d8-)
snip
-------------
Not all arguments/opinions are created equal.

While it is most likely correct not to argue about the person, it
is useful to know their reputation, bias and historical accuracy,
and weight/value the opinions accordingly.

I'll buy that. Especially if that's the only thing we have to go on. And
absent the kind of research I did to respond to Joe, that *is* all he has to
go on.


One of the worst faults is the "opinion for hire," as it is
difficult to impossible to tell if the views expressed are what
they think or what they were paid to write. "Sophistry," the
ability to argue either side of an issue for a price, was not
highly regarded in classical times, and should not be valued
hightly today.

I'll buy that, too. However, as long as it's clear whose opinion is being
expressed, writing for hire, opinion or otherwise, is a standard part of our
world.

I've done plenty of it. But you will never see my byline on anything I write
for some interested party (since it pays better, I hope to never see my
byline again g). For that, I ghostwrite over *their* byline. Let the
reader know that the one signing the piece can be expected to be grinding an
ax.

The lowest thing, or one of the lowest things, in my trade is implying that
you are a writer or an editor, or an academic with no commercial interest,
while actually writing promotional work for someone who *does* have a
commercial interest.

That's what Ferrara did. He was paid by Abramoff to write pieces promoting
Abramoff's clients, while using his own byline and never telling us about
his gun-for-hire status, or which commercial interest was paying his bills.
That's not acceptable.

--
Ed Huntress

"Ed Huntress" wrote in message
...

"F. George McDuffee" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 17 Feb 2009 11:39:44 -0500, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:

snip
Jeeze

Ferrara wrote something that wasn't supported factually by any standard..
Joe Gwinn and others bought it becuse they wanted to.
OK, fine. Ignorance is bliss.
Opinions aren't really like assholes.A formulation is required.
Opinions that are worth something are backed up by facts and the facts are
that the Reagan administration implimented a policy that sell on it's ass.

That, BTW, isn't an opinion. It's history.


JC

"John R. Carroll" wrote in message
...

"Ed Huntress" wrote in message
...

"F. George McDuffee" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 17 Feb 2009 11:39:44 -0500, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:

snip
Jeeze

Ferrara wrote something that wasn't supported factually by any standard..
Joe Gwinn and others bought it becuse they wanted to.
OK, fine. Ignorance is bliss.
Opinions aren't really like assholes.A formulation is required.
Opinions that are worth something are backed up by facts and the facts are
that the Reagan administration implimented a policy that sell on it's ass.

That, BTW, isn't an opinion. It's history.


JC

I'll buy that, too. Just remember, though, I'm very cheap...except when I'm
writing for hire. d8-)

--
Ed Huntress

On Tue, 17 Feb 2009 18:11:28 -0800, "John R. Carroll"
wrote:
snip
Opinions that are worth something are backed up by facts and the facts are
that the Reagan administration implimented a policy that sell {fell?} on it's ass.

That, BTW, isn't an opinion. It's history.
snip
--------------
While the numerical/quantifable results may indeed be history and
immutable [except on Wiki] (however many of these are still
slowly playing out in the geo-political sphere, e.g.
South/Central America and the Contras), the perception and
interpretation of these results is not fixed and depends entirely
on the criteria selected. I.e., "beauty is in the eye of the
beholder."

It is exactly this that makes the increasingly rapid
fragmentation and stratification of American society/culture so
dangerous.

The people in charge may be honestly doing everything possible,
and working 24/7, to "make things better," but if the criteria
they have selected does not closely match/parallel the
criteria/expectations of the majority, their actions will be
perceived as perverse and of evil intent, with the result that
the people in charge perceive the majority as a bunch of sore
head malcontents and ingrates, while the majority perceive the
people in charge as a bunch of incompetent [or venial] doofeses.

Putting it mildly, this is not conducive to political stability
and bypartisanship in government, and trust/cooperation in
business/society.


Unka' George [George McDuffee]
-------------------------------------------
He that will not apply new remedies,
must expect new evils:
for Time is the greatest innovator: and
if Time, of course, alter things to the worse,
and wisdom and counsel shall not alter them to the better,
what shall be the end?

Francis Bacon (1561-1626), English philosopher, essayist, statesman.
Essays, "Of Innovations" (1597-1625).

"F. George McDuffee" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 17 Feb 2009 18:11:28 -0800, "John R. Carroll"
wrote:
snip
Opinions that are worth something are backed up by facts and the facts are
that the Reagan administration implimented a policy that sell {fell?} on
it's ass.

LOL
That's it.


That, BTW, isn't an opinion. It's history.
snip
--------------
While the numerical/quantifable results may indeed be history and
immutable [except on Wiki] (however many of these are still
slowly playing out in the geo-political sphere, e.g.
South/Central America and the Contras), the perception and
interpretation of these results is not fixed and depends entirely
on the criteria selected. I.e., "beauty is in the eye of the
beholder."
(beer holder?)


It is exactly this that makes the increasingly rapid
fragmentation and stratification of American society/culture so
dangerous.

The people in charge may be honestly doing everything possible,
and working 24/7, to "make things better," but if the criteria
they have selected does not closely match/parallel the
criteria/expectations of the majority, their actions will be
perceived as perverse and of evil intent, with the result that
the people in charge perceive the majority as a bunch of sore
head malcontents and ingrates, while the majority perceive the
people in charge as a bunch of incompetent [or venial] doofeses.

Putting it mildly, this is not conducive to political stability
and bypartisanship in government, and trust/cooperation in
business/society.

Is all of that another way of saying the road to hell is paved with good
intentions George?
LOL

JC

In article ,
"Ed Huntress" wrote:

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
In article ,
"Ed Huntress" wrote:

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
In article ,
"Ed Huntress" wrote:

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
In article ,
"Ed Huntress" wrote:

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
The title says it all.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123431484726570949.html

The Wall Street Journal, 11 February 2009.

Joe Gwinn

Peter Ferrara, known as the "Payola Pundit" for his op-eds-for-pay
deal
with
Jack Abramoff, is the guy who brought us the idea of privatizing
Social
Security, among other ideology-driven blunders.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

Once you're an acknowledged journalistic whore, you can't salvage your
credibility by invoking Latin names for Greek philosophy. Guest
editorialists who don't acknowledge that they're being paid to promote
a
certain opinion -- particularly if they identify their associations
and
interests but fail to mention that they've been paid by another,
interested
party for their words -- have screwed themselves.

I did google Ferrara, and found the story you allude to. But it isn't
Farrara who is making an ad hominem attack, it's Huntress.

You're letting the dictionary constrain your thinking, Joe. An "attack"
on
the man in a debate is a flimsy, but often valid, logical fallacy (many
logical fallacies produce truthful results). But a case in which
someone's
integrity is the primary imprimatur by which their assertions have
validity
is one in which it's legitimate to question their record of integrity.

Umm. Huntress did attack the man, not his argument.

Hey, Joe, I said the guy has a bad reputation for integrity in what he
writes. Then I demonstrated it by checking his facts and finding they were
less than truthful.

If you weren't going to check the facts, why did you think enough of the
editorial to post it here in the first place? What was the basis on which
you judged its veracity? Or did you not care whether it was truthful or not?

You are in effect requiring that people spend a week fact-checking
everything they read before mentioning something in public. Not going
to happen. Very few people have that kind of time, and this is one
reason newspapers exist.

Those same people are nonetheless not persuaded when someone tries to
overwhelm them with references too numerous or or large or remote to
check.

When one plucks something from a major newspaper like the WSJ or the
NYT, one assumes that those newspapers have done the fact checking for
you.

Now, opinion pieces are not news articles, but still you won't see
pieces that the editors think nonsense. (Unless the writer is
politically powerful - if the government of X says something, it's news
and arguably interesting, even if it isn't completely true. Which is
often the case.)


Since you didn't check Ferrara's facts, you were relying on his
integrity,
and the procedures the WSJ uses to validate facts in their editorial
pages.
I pointed out that Ferrara's integrity is known to be wanting, by his own
admission. And I could have told you that the WSJ doesn't make much
effort
to validate anything said in their editorial pages. Neither do most other
newspapers or other news sources.

It's the opinion section. I suspect that this is a lumper versus
splitter argument. Ferrara is making a grand sweep argument, which of
necessity rides rough over many a detail.

Bull. As I pointed out, it flat-out contradicts the facts.

In the real world, no grand
sweep argument ever perfectly fits the known facts, for a multitude of
reasons. This does not prove that the grand sweep is wrong; a grander
disproof is required.

When I find that a writer misrepresents the facts, I conclude that his
"grand sweep argument" is more likely than not to be a bunch of bull. If you
make an argument and it's derived from invalid or misrepresented data, what
does that say about the strength of your "argument"?

It looks like you're practicing apologia here for Ferrarra's phony argument.
Casuistry is a fine art, Joe. It takes years of training in a monestary or a
conservative think tank to be good at standing the truth on its head and
making it sound believable. Ferrara has had more practice at it than most.
g

Hmm. The ad hominem aim point is moving ever closer ... there is
rumbling in the distance.


The form of the argument is that X is a bad person so nothing X says
can
be true. Non sequitur, no matter how bad X is.

Nor does it follow that because Y is good, that all that Y says is
true.

I know that, fer chrissake. I'm not commenting on the Aristotelian
fallacies. Aristotelian logic is a tool, not a straightjacket. It can
tell
you when something is 100% likely to be true but it says NOTHING about
things that are 98% likely to be true. That's one of the two key
weaknesses
in simple, deductive, Aristotelian logic. This is not my opinion, BTW.

I'm commenting on what you accept as validation for truth. And, as we
learned, you made the wrong assumptions. You assumed he was being
accurate, but he was not.

So, stop making ad hominem arguments. There are better arguments.

Let's see your better argument opposing or favoring Ferrara's editorial,
then. So far, you haven't offered one. And there's no way you can evaluate
his argument without knowing if his facts are right. If you aren't going to
investigate it, all you have to go on is what almost all of us do almost all
of the time with such arguments: judge on the basis of what you know about
the integrity and ability of the one making the claim.

In other words, if we don't have the time to dig as deep as you, we are
required to accept your judgement of the veracity and meaning of the
facts?

Now, it's well known that different people can come to very different
judgements after studying the same area, unless that area is too simple
to be worth the effort, so effort alone isn't persuasive.

In the Law, the parallel is to say that "reasonable men may differ",
meaning that one cannot prove that either position is correct to the
exclusion of the other.


I did not assume that Ferrara was accurate. I assumed only that his
thesis was interesting.

Twisted statistics, in the hands of a practiced prevaricator, can be very
interesting indeed.

And it certainly has generated debate.

No it hasn't. Where is the debate about his thesis? The only debate is over
how you evaluate a polemic if you don't know whether it's based on honest
facts.

Well it's certainly true that we have drifted into a debate about the
legitimacy of ad hominem arguments.


Don't put much stock in him, Joe. He's totally skewed the facts in
that
op-ed, which is something he does all the time. More honest is
Reagan's
chastened Budget Director, David Stockman, who said ""If the
[Securities and
Exchange Commission] had jurisdiction over the White House, we
might
have
all had time for a course in remedial economics at Allenwood
Penitentiary."

Except for Carter appointee Paul Volcker, Reagan's economists were
a
greedy and wacky bunch about whom, Stockman also said, "None of us
really
understand what's going on with all these numbers."

Isn't this true of economist in general, admitted or not? Not to
mention politicians?

No, not in general. Stockman was a schoolmate of mine. I never knew him
personally, but he was an ambitious and noisy one, and, given the times
(1966-68), his political views were off on a tangent. If you ever read
his
book you know he was a little wacky. And Reagan agglomerated a really odd
mix of economists -- including, BTW, Paul Krugman -- who were all
a'twitter
about ideology from the Austrian School. Krugman, a minor economist under
Reagan, had just finished his noteworthy work on the virtues of free
trade,
and, although he was leftish, it fit in with the Chicago Univ. and
Austrian
School types who fleshed out the team.

If you believe that Stockman is wacky, why quote him as an authority?

Not as an authority. The quotes, along with the rest of his book, _The
Triumph of Politics..._, show he was a bit of a wack job. And he was the
brains behind key elements of Reaganomics.

Do you think the Ronald Reagan had anything to do with it?


About the greed: I haven't seen anything about this for years, so I don't
remember the details, but they had enough background and connections with
the financial upper crust that it was no surprise that they thought
"trickle-down" economics was just ducky. They and their class got theirs
first. The rest of us got the crumbs that filtered down through the
depths.
They really believed that stuff.

I have a more general problem with greed as an explanation for anything:
People have always been greedy, and always will be, so greed cannot be
the explanation for much of anything. If greed were the answer, why
didn't bad thing happen years earlier, rather than time of most
recent explosion?

Because these people were particularly shameless about it.

I'm not sure what to make of this, or why it would matter even if it
were true that people are more shameless now than then.


More generally, the whole point of Adam Smith is the harnessing of greed
to the common good.

My edition of _Wealth of Nations_ runs 1,072 pages, and it contains a lot of
cautions about greed, and comments that Smith made about the necessity to
control it. The general point that Smith made, and which most people never
read or forgot, is that the benefits are derived from ENLIGHTENED
self-interest. Unlike Smith, Alan Greenspan thought that the enlightenment
part came naturally and automatically. Obviously, as he has since said
himself, Greenspan was wrong.

Likewise, assuming that the self-interest of government officials and
advisors can be counted on to be "enlightened" proved to be a misplaced
faith during the Reagan and Bush 43 administrations. You can call it a
matter of culture, or of character, but it seems to matter what philosophy
and ethics the officials and advisors bring with them to the job.

I suspect that Adam Smith expressed no opinion on Greenspan, Reagan, or
Bush.

Adam Smith certainly did talk of greed. As I said, his whole point was
to explain how capitalist economies harness greed to the common good,
and the enlightenment was from reacting to the incentives built into the
system, not to expecting human nature to suddenly improve.

By contrast, communism tried to convince people not to be greedy, which
required human nature to change. We know how that turned out, and yet
there are people saying that the recent financial unpleasantness proves
that capitalism doesn't work. Not exactly. But it's pointless to argue
with them.


The economic points about Reagan are that our recovery from
stagflation had
nothing to do with anything he or his crew did; it was done by
Volcker's
policies, which were approved by Carter. And Reagan drove us into
the
biggest national debt in peacetime history. Reagonomics, as an
economic
philosophy, directly sowed the seeds of our current collapse.

Ed, I really don't care if he's a running dog. Even saints can
speak
untruths, even thieves can speak the truth. The problem is to tell
which is which.

Unless you have spent a great deal of time examining what Ferrara
says,
and the counterarguments to it, all you have to go on is Ferrara's
credibility.
In that regard, see above.

Appeal to authority is a weak argument, in either direction.

I would doubt that The Wall Street Journal is unaware of the Farrara's
connection with Abramoff.

I'll be watching the Letters to the Editor to see what reactions roll
in.

Don't be surprised if nothing rolls in. How many people do you think make
the effort to check his facts? That's part of my trade. Not many people
do
it.

The most you're likely to see is some grumbling.

Perhaps. The next few days should tell.


What points that he made would you dispute, and why?

sigh I figured you were going to make me do this. Okay, here goes:

CLAIM:

"In 1981, Reagan forced through Congress not only his famed, historic
tax
cuts, but also a package of budget cuts
close to 5% of the federal budget -- equivalent to roughly $150
billion
today."

FACT:

They weren't budget cuts, they were budget increases. This is the
result
Reagan's famed package, which he "forced through Congress":
http://research.stlouisfed.org/publi...Budget_Jan_Feb
198
9.pdf
(Figure 3, page 22)

CLAIM:

"Even with the Reagan defense buildup, which helped win the Cold War,
total
federal spending declined to 21.2% of GDP
in 1989 from 23.5% of GDP in 1983. That's a real reduction of 10% in
the
size of government relative to the economy.

FACT:

Misleading by cherry-picking dates. Reagan inherited a rate of 22.2%.
He
promptly drove it up to 23.5%. Then it diddled around and settled at
21.2%.
It was lower under Carter (20.7%) and Clinton (around 19%).

http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/assets...heets/hist01z2.
xls


This occurred during a substantial increase in GDP, so the actual,
inflation-adjusted spending during his two terms went up a great deal,
and
at a high rate:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/FGEXPND?cid=107


CLAIM:

"The fourth component of the Reagan recovery plan was tight,
anti-inflation
monetary policy, which was spectacularly successful. Inflation was cut
in
half to 6.2% in 1982 from 13.2% in 1980, and cut in half again to 3.2%
in
1983."

Isn't that amazing? And all it took was the worst recession since the
1930s
to do it. g:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/fredgraph?s[1][id]=CPIAUCNS

I won't go into saving and investing, because the supply-side vampires
have
twisted the data into such a knot that it would take us all day to
show
what
b.s.'ers they are, and you can see enough from the above to see what
happens
when you expose their b.s. to the light of day and original-source
data.

It will take me some time to digest your cites above.

Take all the time you want. g

I shall. Pentagrid (RPC issues) is ahead of this issue in line.


In sum, Reagan plowed some new ground with his program, turning the US
into
an economics experiment that college sophomores could only dream of.
For
the
most part, it laid an egg. As the Fed's research department said (in a
report approved by Reagan appointees, in 1989):

"In 1981, the newly inaugurated Reagan administration formulated a
budget
plan designed to slow the growth of government and boost incentives
(via
taxes) to save, invest and work. Included in the projections was a
movement
toward a balanced federal budget by 1986. The actual rise in the
federal
deficit since 1981, culminating with a $221 billion deficit in 1986,
suggests that the Reagan budget program failed. Examination of the
factors
contributing to the deficit as well as the composition of both outlays
and
receipts, however, indicates broadly why this result occurred and
points
out
that there were a number of successes as well as failures when
individual
components of the federal budget are considered."

Which report? What's the URL? I'd like to see the context of the
quote.

"Federal Budget Trends and the 1981 Reagan Economic Plan," St. Louis
Federal
Reserve research dept., 1989, pp. 27-28.

http://research.stlouisfed.org/publi...get_Jan_Feb198
9.pdf

Thanks.


Nothing much like what Ferrarra says, huh? He's a bull****ter, Joe,
just
like most of the supply-siders. He isn't even very good at it, because
far
more hopelessly entwined arguments have been made by the heavy
hitters.
However, as I've learned from occasionally digging into their claims,
they all fold up like vampires when you shine a little sunlight on
them.

Now, if you come back with another URL for some wacko's op-ed or
article,
and it contains numbers, it's YOUR turn to go to the sources and
document
it all, OK?

You have more practice and far more time than I do, so I probably won't
even try to match you here.

It's not fair of me, I know, but I do my best to be fair and accurate
when I
go off like I did above. In this case, I'm not trying to give a balanced
analysis of Reagonomics (not that I could, anyway), but only to counter
Ferrara's misrepresentations. That was the issue, and my complaint.

Now, you do know that the issue is the level of balance of the analyst
in question. If the analyst isn't well balanced, wacko results are
likely, and the harder the analyst works the stranger the result. And
the analyst will never know, because it fits his unbalance. Present
company excluded, of course.

Aren't you the guy who just said not to argue about the man, but about the
argument itself? If your issue is whether the analyst is "well balanced,"
how would you know unless you do an in-depth analysis of his analysis? d8-)

What's good for the goose is good for the gander.


There are analysts worth listening to, and those who are not. We can't
double-check everything we read. So we apply our background knowledge about
the one making the claims, unless we have reason to make a larger effort.

It's a lot like Jesse Jackson's statement to the effect that he feels safer
encountering a group of young white boys on a dark street than encountering
a group of young black boys. We stereotype, we make judgments based on scant
knowledge -- and if we didn't, we couldn't survive as a species. It's too
bad, but that's humans for you.

As for balance in analysis, that's what an education is supposed to teach
us. Unfortunately, that system is breaking down.

Education can give one analytical tools, but cannot make the blind see.

Dwight Eisenhower had a very useful method. When some military action
was being considered, he would assign a number of his staffers to
prepare the case for and the case against. The twist was that he did
not tell the staffers which side they would be presenting; this being
announced only at the presentation. So, all the staffers were forced to
prepare both sides of the argument with equal diligence and fervor.
Eisenhower did this to ensure balance, and to nullify the effect of mere
eloquence.

A parallel was when a lawyer friend of mine commented that a lawyer
colleague of ours (at the FCC in the 1970s) was professionally crippled
by her inability to understand and fairly state any argument with which
she disagreed.


I realize that most people don't have the experience to do it quickly
enough
to be practical. Let me temper the whole thing by saying there is more to
Reagonomics than Ferrara is claiming or that I am reporting, to which I
tried to give some balance by quoting from the Fed's analysis, above. As
they say, there were successes, and there were failures. These things are
almost never black and white, but Ferrara was implying as much.

If you want to get into Reagonomics in depth, I hope you'll find someone
to
discuss it with. g I'm not game for that. It's a career, not a
discussion.

The key issue is time. Experience helps to make the research more
efficient, but still it comes back to time. It may be unfair, but
people are not convinced when presented with a pile of stuff that it's
impractical for them to check.

Don't tell that to some individuals here. They often don't even check the
stuff they present. Those cites that haven't had broken links for the past
two years often are about a subject that isn't even related. g

You can count on that never happening with any references I post. If I post
it, I've read it -- and it says what I claim it says. In this case, I culled
out three or four good references for every one I left, because they were
just duplicative, or they were buried in arcane analyses, or they didn't add
anything crucial to my point.

It's true that some postings are better supported than others.

The problem with selection is often selection. Often one finds the
counterargument to a quote nearby in the same article.


But I don't buy that editorials in the WSJ are necessarily wacko.

They aren't. But the WSJ has always gone for the provocative writers, and
their editorials are rightish, so you get rightish provocative writers.
Any
polarized and provocative editorialists are likely to be selective
polemicists, not objective reporters.

And the NYT writers are paragons of rationality, free of all bias and
cant.

Not at all. But they don't often cite phony facts. And they're much better
writers.

Than WSJ writers? I would assume that the WSJ would dispute that point.

WSJ has twice the circulation of NYT. Must be the bad writing.


The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times are the number one and
number two newspapers in the US, with circulations of two million and
one million respectively. (USA Today has larger circulation, but is
not
playing in this league.)

It goes without saying that The Wall Street Journal and The New York
Times do not see eye to eye on many subjects, and when one says that
the
editorial pages of one or the other are crazy, one is simply expressing
disagreement with their worldview and politics.

I'm not The New York Times. It isn't they who are saying the WSJ's
editorialists are often wacky. It's me saying that. d8-)

Umm. Let's say that you sound a lot more like the NYT than the WSJ.
And you live close enough to NYC to be in their reality distortion
field. Guilt by propinquity. Is there a problem with this?

Which propinquity? You DO know where the Wall Street Journal is published,
right? d8-)

Of course I do. WSJ almost lost an office to 9/11.


I've commented before that the WSJ's reporting has always been first class.
And if you think the WSJ's editorials are well-regarded by people who follow
it closely, even those of the rightist persuasion, you simply don't know the
publishing industry.

For one small example, Bill Kristol, neocon extraordinaire, who doesn't like
Rush Limbaugh because Rush is full of lies and crap, says Limbaugh is
"almost a Wall Street Journal editorial page of the airwaves." g

The consensus is that the WSJ's reporting is among the best, and that their
editorials, including staff-written ones but also op-eds, are junk, full of
half-truths and distorted data. The two departments are separated by a
virtual brick wall. The reporters used to call the editorial department "the
Nazis."

Not having ever been a journalist, I cannot comment on the reputations
of the two organizations in the journalism world. But I would guess that
there are lots of arguments about this between journalists. All fields
have these debates, and internal politics.


You seem to be taking the position that Larry takes about politicians:
they're all equally guilty, biased, distorted, or whatever. Baloney. Former
Reagan speech writer and Washington Times editorial-page editor Tony
Blanckley put it best in the editorial I quoted in another thread: the Times
is simply the most reliably accurate new source in the world. That's why
righties hate it so much: it leans leftish, and everybody who has major
political or financial consequence knows that it's more accurate than any of
its opponents.

Oops. Whiplash. We were talking about the op-ed pages, and then
suddenly veered into the news department, after mentioning a brick wall.


For balance, perhaps you should apply your considerable analytical
skills to editorials in the NYT. Or better, pairs of warring
editorials
in the two papers.

As they used to say on a TV show, that's your assignment, should you
choose
to take it.

Umm. It was "mission". And then the tape self destructed.


I don't do the NYT. But if you choose to, you'll find plenty of
material. Their editorialists are among the best, but they aren't
invulnerable. Thomas Friedman, for example, can often be dissected like a
frying chicken if you're so disposed. The same applies to some of Bob
Herbert's editorials. And Maureen Dowd often is just going for laughs.
David
Brooks often seems to like hearing himself think, no matter what he's
thinking about at the moment.

But the WSJ editorials are somewhat nuttier, IMO. Supply-side economics
requires a fairly extreme willingness to believe.

Well, I find the NYT editorials to be the nuttier. Well, naive. As I
said, it depends on one's worldview and politics.

Not really. It depends mostly on whether you check their facts. If you do,
the equivocation quickly evaporates.

There are no shortcuts to uncovering the truth about things like that. You
either do the work and dig for the facts, or you have to fall back on your
personal prejudices.

Well, as I said, people are not disposed to believe a report just
because the reporter worked very hard. One can always argue that people
shouldn't be so lazy, but don't expect much to change, and persuasion
must be found elsewhere.

More generally, one can argue that convincing a few people on RCM is
inefficient compared to getting a critical letter to the editor into the
WSJ, by a factor of a million. Yes, they do publish such letters; I see
them all the time. I will say that such letters focus on a few key facts
or assumptions and refute them. It can be no other way, as letters are
limited to 5-10 column inches.

Joe Gwinn

On Wed, 18 Feb 2009 10:05:00 -0500, Joseph Gwinn
wrote:
snip some good stuff
Adam Smith certainly did talk of greed. As I said, his whole point was
to explain how capitalist economies harness greed to the common good,
and the enlightenment was from reacting to the incentives built into the
system, not to expecting human nature to suddenly improve.
snip some more good stuff
==============
While Adam Smith does offer insight, and was a good writer, his
"Wealth of Nations" was published in 1776, and it is well to
consider the context/environment in which it was written.

A possibly serious difficulty is the "drift" in the meaning of
words or phrases over the 250 years since the publication of
"Wealth of Nations," with the result that modern meanings are
[incorrectly] assigned/assumed.

There is also the difficulty that Smith himself made several
major changes/revisions in the different editions published
during his lifetime. [1776, 1778, 1784, 1786, and 1789].

Smith does appear to have been a first-rate intellect and was in
the forefront of the Scottish enlightenment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Smith

Moreover Edinburgh [and even London] had a very different
environment/society than today's America, with the result that
many of the tacit/implicit assumptions underlying his conclusions
are no longer valid, and thus many of the book's findings are no
longer generally operational, although these may remain valid in
the proper [limited] context such as a small community in
relative isolation.

Among the tacit/implicit assumptions/conditions:

(1) That "social control," the approval/disapproval of the
community has at least some moderating influence on individual
behavior. "Social Control" in modern society, with increasing
anonymity, "one night stands," [in several senses] and
transnational corporate structure is largely an illusion.

(2) The scale of the organized economic activity. In Smith's
day, an enterprise with 100 employees was considered huge,
although exceptions did exist such as the East India Company, but
these were quasi governmental entities.

(3) Gold was money and money was gold.

(4) The bulk of the population was engaged in subsistence
agriculture.

(5) Within Scotland and England the population was generally
homogeneous, albeit with some religious differentiation.

(6) International trade was more or less limited to luxury goods
and commodities, with few transnational/collonial operations in
Europe, again with the exception of the East India Company and
the Rothschilds.

(7) Communications and transportation were unreliable and both
slow and expensive by today's standards.

(8) The regional economies existed in relative isolation, and the
impact of a famine or market collapse [such as tulip bulbs in
Holland] in other locations had little impact on the majority of
the population.

(9) Although the memory was fading, the Darien disaster
established with government backing/encouragement which lead to
the loss of national independence was still in the minds of many
Scots.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darien_scheme

There are of course many others, but these give the general idea.


Unka' George [George McDuffee]
-------------------------------------------
He that will not apply new remedies,
must expect new evils:
for Time is the greatest innovator: and
if Time, of course, alter things to the worse,
and wisdom and counsel shall not alter them to the better,
what shall be the end?

Francis Bacon (1561-1626), English philosopher, essayist, statesman.
Essays, "Of Innovations" (1597-1625).

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
In article ,

snip

In other words, if we don't have the time to dig as deep as you, we are
required to accept your judgement of the veracity and meaning of the
facts?

You can always check them for yourself. I made it as easy for you as I
possibly could, even giving you URLs to the original-source resources, and,
where there were multiple pages, I pointed out the page numbers. What else
do you want me to do?



Now, it's well known that different people can come to very different
judgements after studying the same area, unless that area is too simple
to be worth the effort, so effort alone isn't persuasive.

Well, then, look at the damned data instead of flapping your gums and
pontificating about your philosophies. I'm talking about documented facts.
You're talking about...what?

snip


And it certainly has generated debate.

No it hasn't. Where is the debate about his thesis? The only debate is
over
how you evaluate a polemic if you don't know whether it's based on honest
facts.

Well it's certainly true that we have drifted into a debate about the
legitimacy of ad hominem arguments.

Pfffhhht. That's just a distraction you're using to avoid facing the facts
that Ferrara claimed, which are simply not true.


Well, as I said, people are not disposed to believe a report just
because the reporter worked very hard. One can always argue that people
shouldn't be so lazy, but don't expect much to change, and persuasion
must be found elsewhere.

More generally, one can argue that convincing a few people on RCM is
inefficient compared to getting a critical letter to the editor into the
WSJ, by a factor of a million. Yes, they do publish such letters; I see
them all the time. I will say that such letters focus on a few key facts
or assumptions and refute them. It can be no other way, as letters are
limited to 5-10 column inches.

Joe Gwinn

I have no interest in writing letters to convince readers of a newspaper. I
used to do that decades ago, and it's good practice for an expository
writer, but most of us give that up as we mature except, perhaps, for an
occasional subject about which we're particularly passionate. And I'm not
interested in convincing you. As I've said several times over the years, I
get into these things here for one reason and one reason only: I'm
interested in seeing how other people's thinking works.

And here's what I see in this circumstance:

You pointed to an op-ed here that you said was "interesting," with no
further comment. You later said you posted it for discussion.

I pointed out that your op-ed came from a notoriously unreliable source. You
accused me of ad hominem argument and asked if I had a better argument.

So I produced one, showing why Ferrara has acquired his reputation by
picking out just three statements he made, and, by leading you to the
original sources of the data, showed you how he had misrepresented it --
either by flatly contradicting numbers, in the case of his claims about
Reagan's "budget cuts," or by showing how he had cherry-picked the years in
evidence so he could claim that Reagan had made progress where he actually
did nothing much at all.

Then you divert, claiming that "details" (read, facts) may not be important
when the writer has a larger point to make. To me, that sounds like lying to
support a phony conclusion. To you, it apparently means something else.

So I'm curious about how you're thinking about this, and I go along as you
run all over the lot introducing Adam Smith, the difficulty of finding time
to investigate claims, and so on.

And that's where we are. To bring it back to the simple disagreement, I
never assumed that you knew or had much interest in the facts. But you asked
me to support my objections, and I did. Your response is to posit
generalities about one paper versus another, and about what you should
expect editors to fact-check (an absolute misunderstanding on your part,
because they don't check the veracity of claims made in guest editorials;
you have to rely on the integrity of the writer for that), and how the
weight of multiple references does not make the argument convincing.

Of course it doesn't. It's the *facts* contained in those references that
support or refute the argument. If you're just measuring the list with a
ruler, you aren't addressing the point being presented, which is that the
support for my points is clear and unequivocal.

I made it as simple for you as I could, identifying only three clear
statements made by Ferrara that could be verified or not by three original
data sources. If I were trying to convince you of something and you skipped
from asking me to explain my point, to dismissing it because I gave you too
many data points for you to comfortably check, I would have just brushed you
off as someone who likes to hear himself talk but who doesn't really care
about the truth of what he's talking about.

But I stuck with it a bit longer to see what's going on in your head. That's
what interests me. I still don't know, except that I see that you resent
documentation that contradicts Ferrara's argument for some reason, and that
you've dodged around actually debating the facts themselves.

It's interesting but not particularly satisfying. However, if you have more
to say about it, I'm interested. AFAIC, we've already put the facts to bed,
and Ferrara has been shown, once again, to be full of it. If you disagree,
please tell us why you disagree.

--
Ed Huntress

In article ,
"Ed Huntress" wrote:

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
In article ,

snip

In other words, if we don't have the time to dig as deep as you, we are
required to accept your judgement of the veracity and meaning of the
facts?

You can always check them for yourself. I made it as easy for you as I
possibly could, even giving you URLs to the original-source resources, and,
where there were multiple pages, I pointed out the page numbers. What else
do you want me to do?

I will check these page refs when I finish the current project, on RPCs.


Now, it's well known that different people can come to very different
judgements after studying the same area, unless that area is too simple
to be worth the effort, so effort alone isn't persuasive.

Well, then, look at the damned data instead of flapping your gums and
pontificating about your philosophies. I'm talking about documented facts.
You're talking about...what?

I was making a point about effective and ineffective argumentation. You
may choose to not believe, but I would suggest you think about it.


snip


And it certainly has generated debate.

No it hasn't. Where is the debate about his thesis? The only debate is
over
how you evaluate a polemic if you don't know whether it's based on honest
facts.

Well it's certainly true that we have drifted into a debate about the
legitimacy of ad hominem arguments.

Pfffhhht. That's just a distraction you're using to avoid facing the facts
that Ferrara claimed, which are simply not true.


Well, as I said, people are not disposed to believe a report just
because the reporter worked very hard. One can always argue that people
shouldn't be so lazy, but don't expect much to change, and persuasion
must be found elsewhere.

More generally, one can argue that convincing a few people on RCM is
inefficient compared to getting a critical letter to the editor into the
WSJ, by a factor of a million. Yes, they do publish such letters; I see
them all the time. I will say that such letters focus on a few key facts
or assumptions and refute them. It can be no other way, as letters are
limited to 5-10 column inches.

Joe Gwinn

I have no interest in writing letters to convince readers of a newspaper. I
used to do that decades ago, and it's good practice for an expository
writer, but most of us give that up as we mature except, perhaps, for an
occasional subject about which we're particularly passionate. And I'm not
interested in convincing you. As I've said several times over the years, I
get into these things here for one reason and one reason only: I'm
interested in seeing how other people's thinking works.

A million to one isn't good enough.


And here's what I see in this circumstance:

You pointed to an op-ed here that you said was "interesting," with no
further comment. You later said you posted it for discussion.

I pointed out that your op-ed came from a notoriously unreliable source. You
accused me of ad hominem argument and asked if I had a better argument.

So I produced one, showing why Ferrara has acquired his reputation by
picking out just three statements he made, and, by leading you to the
original sources of the data, showed you how he had misrepresented it --
either by flatly contradicting numbers, in the case of his claims about
Reagan's "budget cuts," or by showing how he had cherry-picked the years in
evidence so he could claim that Reagan had made progress where he actually
did nothing much at all.

Then you divert, claiming that "details" (read, facts) may not be important
when the writer has a larger point to make. To me, that sounds like lying to
support a phony conclusion. To you, it apparently means something else.

It's the lumper versus splitter issue. Comes up a lot is such issues.


So I'm curious about how you're thinking about this, and I go along as you
run all over the lot introducing Adam Smith, the difficulty of finding time
to investigate claims, and so on.

And that's where we are. To bring it back to the simple disagreement, I
never assumed that you knew or had much interest in the facts. But you asked
me to support my objections, and I did. Your response is to posit
generalities about one paper versus another, and about what you should
expect editors to fact-check (an absolute misunderstanding on your part,
because they don't check the veracity of claims made in guest editorials;
you have to rely on the integrity of the writer for that), and how the
weight of multiple references does not make the argument convincing.

Of course it doesn't. It's the *facts* contained in those references that
support or refute the argument. If you're just measuring the list with a
ruler, you aren't addressing the point being presented, which is that the
support for my points is clear and unequivocal.

I made it as simple for you as I could, identifying only three clear
statements made by Ferrara that could be verified or not by three original
data sources. If I were trying to convince you of something and you skipped
from asking me to explain my point, to dismissing it because I gave you too
many data points for you to comfortably check, I would have just brushed you
off as someone who likes to hear himself talk but who doesn't really care
about the truth of what he's talking about.

But I stuck with it a bit longer to see what's going on in your head. That's
what interests me. I still don't know, except that I see that you resent
documentation that contradicts Ferrara's argument for some reason, and that
you've dodged around actually debating the facts themselves.

It's interesting but not particularly satisfying. However, if you have more
to say about it, I'm interested. AFAIC, we've already put the facts to bed,
and Ferrara has been shown, once again, to be full of it. If you disagree,
please tell us why you disagree.

You might consider rereading the entire volley of messages, from the
beginning. I think what I'm saying is fairly clear, agree or not. But
it's been lost in the heat of battle.

I don't expect that I will convince you, and I'm out of energy.

I'll probably read the references you provided, but won't admit to it in
public.

Joe Gwinn

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
In article ,
"Ed Huntress" wrote:

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
In article ,

snip

I'm going to leave you now and let you check the data or not; it really
doesn't matter to me. But I want to address this point, because, as you say,
it often comes up he


Then you divert, claiming that "details" (read, facts) may not be
important
when the writer has a larger point to make. To me, that sounds like lying
to
support a phony conclusion. To you, it apparently means something else.

It's the lumper versus splitter issue. Comes up a lot is such issues.

In no way is this a "lumper versus splitter" issue. This is a "don't let the
facts get in the way of the ideological narrative I have running in my head"
issue. Ferrara isn't generalizing from abstractions. He's drawing upon
specific examples of data to support his assertion that Reagan's economics
was successful. Only the examples don't support it. In his own terms,
according to the very measures of "success" that he applies, the facts
contradict the idea that Reagonomics was successful.

"Lumper versus splitter" refers to big-picture thinking versus
accretion-of-details thinking. But Ferrara himself is relying on details.
Details that he misrepresents. That's what he uses to support his big
theory. Badly.

If there is an argument against Obama's economic policies, you won't find it
in the example Reagan supplies. Because it doesn't supply one. Reagan came
into town riding on the policies that Carter approved when he appointed Paul
Volcker and let him start squeezing the inflation out of our economy. And
then Reagan left town with a $221 billion addition to the national debt. As
the Fed's research report says, and as I've said many times, Reagan's
economic legacy is a mixed bag at best. If Ferrara only focused on the
successes and ignored the failures, you could say he's just writing a
typical, biased polemic.

But he isn't doing that at all. He's writing a fantasy based on fudging and
misrepresenting the facts, not merely on selecting them to make a case.

More often what we see here on this NG is just a case of someone not
bothering with the facts, just drawing conclusions based NOT on what's
actually happening, what's actually measurable, but rather on imagined
"facts" that suit their theory of how things work. That's not "lumper versus
splitter," either. That's just ignoring the facts and building a fantasy
upon imagined facts. That's fine for cracker-barrel discussions if one cares
more about being comfortable with his beliefs than in finding the truth of
the matter. But that isn't what Ferrara has done. He's aware of the facts.
He's just misrepresented them.

So, I'm done with this. Check out the references or not, it's not my
concern. It's a matter of whether you'd like to know the truth of the matter
or if you're content with the ideological narrative as it is, whether it's
based on the truth or on a pack of distortions and outright
misrepresentations. Personally, I can't live on the latter. It goes against
my entire constitution.

--
Ed Huntress

On Feb 15, 11:02*pm, Gunner Asch wrote:

You dont blame the cops for a bank robbery, do you?

Gunner

No, but you, apparently, blame the doctor for your heart attack. The
hypocrisy is staggering.

On Jan 31, 1:31 am, Gunner Asch wrote:

Ayup...but Im going to have a lawyer do all the work for a percentage.
Not only they got it wrong, charged me $10k for 6 hours work, but are
dunning me for the full amount. And damned near killed me. When the
symptoms came on, I treated it like a bronchites attack and didnt bother
calling 9-11. Not a clue that I was having a heart attack. What the
doctor called "on a scale of 1-10..a 5"

Ayup we is gonna have us a talk with the Bakersfield Heart Hospital.....

Gunner