Unethical Commentary, Newsweek Edition

Paul Krugman, NYT

There are multiple errors and misrepresentations in Niall Ferguson's cover story in Newsweek -- I guess they don't do fact-checking -- but this is the one that jumped out at me. Ferguson says:

The president pledged that health-care reform would not add a cent to the deficit. But the CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation now estimate that the insurance-coverage provisions of the ACA will have a net cost of close to $1.2 trillion over the 2012-22 period.

Readers are no doubt meant to interpret this as saying that CBO found that the Act will increase the deficit. But anyone who actually read, or even skimmed, the CBO report (pdf) knows that it found that the ACA would reduce, not increase, the deficit -- because the insurance subsidies were fully paid for.

Now, people on the right like to argue that the CBO was wrong. But that's not the argument Ferguson is making -- he is deliberately misleading readers, conveying the impression that the CBO had actually rejected Obama's claim that health reform is deficit-neutral, when in fact the opposite is true.

(More here.)