A propaganda agency posing as a think tank

Same As They Ever Were

Paul Krugman, NYT

Wheee! The Heritage Foundation is engaged in frantic damage control; not only did its big anti-immigration-reform report turn out to be a steaming heap of, um, bad research, but one of the co-authors turns out to have a serious white supremacist background.

It would be a terrible thing to happen to a serious think tank. But Heritage isn’t a serious think tank, which means that all of this is just a bit of overdue poetic justice.

Remember, Heritage came up with the ludicrous claim that the Ryan plan would cut unemployment to 2.8 percent, then tried to scrub the result from its records. It produced ludicrous “studies” purporting to show that small farmers and businessmen were victims of the estate tax. And there are many, many more examples.

The truth is that Heritage has never been in the business of doing economic analysis; it’s just a propaganda agency posing as a think tank. And this time it finally caught up with them.

(Original here.)