bripat9643
Diamond Member
- Apr 1, 2011
- 170,163
- 47,312
- 2,180
I always knew this guy was full of shit. Socialism was totally discredited about 90 years ago.
Econ book acclaimed by left based on faulty premise factual errors study finds Fox News
Econ book acclaimed by left based on faulty premise factual errors study finds Fox News
A book by a French economist who became a darling of 99 percenters and his lefty peers is riddled with errors, cherry-picked data and flawed premises, according to two new studies.
Thomas Piketty's “Capital in the 21st Century,” which New York Times columnist and Nobel-prize winner Paul Krugman called “the most important economics book of the year — and maybe of the decade,” calls for an 80 percent income tax to stop wealth inequality from increasing. The book earned its author an invitation to the White House to meet with Obama administration Treasury Secretary Jack Lew.
But it contains more than 10 factual errors, according to one new study accepted by the Journal of Private Enterprise and conducted by economists Phillip Magness of George Mason University and Robert P. Murphy of the Institute for Energy Research. The errors they report range from relatively simple mistakes such as getting several historical dates wrong to mis-attributing a massive tax increase to President Franklin Roosevelt that was actually passed by President Herbert Hoover, to incorrectly claiming that the minimum wage never increased under either George W. Bush or George H.W. Bush, who both oversaw increases.
The authors write that they see a pattern in the errors.
“[The errors] serve to paint ostensibly market-friendly Republican presidents as ogres, while liberal Democrats are the heroes of the working class,” they write.
Thomas Piketty's “Capital in the 21st Century,” which New York Times columnist and Nobel-prize winner Paul Krugman called “the most important economics book of the year — and maybe of the decade,” calls for an 80 percent income tax to stop wealth inequality from increasing. The book earned its author an invitation to the White House to meet with Obama administration Treasury Secretary Jack Lew.
But it contains more than 10 factual errors, according to one new study accepted by the Journal of Private Enterprise and conducted by economists Phillip Magness of George Mason University and Robert P. Murphy of the Institute for Energy Research. The errors they report range from relatively simple mistakes such as getting several historical dates wrong to mis-attributing a massive tax increase to President Franklin Roosevelt that was actually passed by President Herbert Hoover, to incorrectly claiming that the minimum wage never increased under either George W. Bush or George H.W. Bush, who both oversaw increases.
The authors write that they see a pattern in the errors.
“He cherry-picks, the data sometimes don’t match the sources that he cites, and he changes the data to make the charts look better without accurately documenting it.”
- Kevin Hassett, American Enterprise Institute
- Kevin Hassett, American Enterprise Institute
“[The errors] serve to paint ostensibly market-friendly Republican presidents as ogres, while liberal Democrats are the heroes of the working class,” they write.
