Frank Kogan

P.S. Ferguson could have tried to save himself by making an argument parallel to the one that Krugman just made about the Congressional Budget Office report on one of Paul Ryan's plans, which is that the CBO was forced to take Ryan's revenue numbers as givens, even though the CBO report itself says that Ryan has specified no path that would generate such revenues. In fact, Ferguson, in a later post (at least as quoted by Joe Weisenthal), does seem to go for a similar argument about Obama's Affordable Care Act, quoting the CBO as saying that it's unclear that the ACA's cost reductions can be achieved. But Ferguson manages to shoot himself beautifully in the foot by (1) quoting the CBO, but (2) cutting the quote off in midsentence, so that anyone who goes back to the original will once again suspect that Ferguson is trying to deceive. To my ignorant eyes, what the CBO wrote in the full sentence is somewhat ambiguous; but it at least is suggesting something opposite to what Ferguson says it says. The CBO seems to be saying that the ACA has a couple of different potential paths by which costs will be cut, but the ACA doesn't specify which path will be taken. What's ambiguous to me is that the CBO sentence is written in the passive voice ("such a reduction can be achieved," without the word "will" [maybe there'd be no ambiguity if I'd read the whole report]), so I don't know for sure that the ACA guarantees that the cost reductions will take place no matter what. But that's because I don't know the ACA. (Weisenthal seems certain himself.)

In any event, Ferguson may have an argument to make, but he doesn't make it. Instead, he (apparently) cheats in his quotation. Just as he'd (apparently) cheated in his Newsweek citation of the CBO report.

Once again, take my "apparently" with a grain of salt. I don't know that Ferguson cheated, but I'm strongly believing the people who say he did, since they're citing and in some instances quoting the CBO report themselves and seem to be acting as if you can't get away with misrepresenting the CBO report, and no one in their crew is calling them out, so presumably they're not misrepresenting it, or Ferguson.

But — again — I'm not quite certain about "cheated," since I really wonder what's going on with Ferguson, as he seems to dig himself in deeper.