Jim DeMint Hasn’t Destroyed Heritage’s Intellectual Integrity

[applegrove]

Jim DeMint Hasn’t Destroyed Heritage’s Intellectual Integrity

by Paul Krugman at the NY Times

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/24/jim-demint-hasnt-destroyed-heritages-intellectual-integrity/?_php=true&_type=blogs&smid=re-share&_r=0

"SNIP.................................




The organization never had any.

I think it’s interesting that DeMint has pushed Heritage into an even more blatant political role; but the subtext of such stories often seems to be that until DeMint arrived Heritage was a center of honest, serious, if conservative-leaning research.

In their dreams — or maybe in the dreams of self-proclaimed centrists, who wanted to believe that such an organization existed.

The truth is that the pre-DeMint Heritage was Hack Central, producing garbage posing as research. It promoted the death tax scam; it proclaimed that the Ryan plan would push the unemployment rate down to 2.8 percent, then tried to send that “result” down the memory hole. Heritage economists have promoted the fallacy that government spending can’t increase demand. And so on.




................................SNIP"

[longship]

1. Short, and sweet R&K nt

[JHB]

2. Bang! Spot On, Professor! And Krugman's only citing recent examples...

They've fashioned numbers in the service of their predetermined policy goals from the start.

Anytime you hear a big, scary number about how much programs for the poor cost, odds are some Heritage Fellow was well-paid to carefully craft a definition that let a lot of programs that mainly benefited the middle class get put in the same category. With the goal of providing report titles for conservative politicians to wave around and numbers to quote, with the MSM happily going onto the next thing before anyone has a chance to dig into the numbers and show how misleading they are.

[applegrove]

4. Yup. They run a truth line with the outcome they want. Then they highlight

only facts that prove it. It works well on the type of 'smart' people who retain all facts and can't distinguish exploitative lying patterns because they weigh all 'information' the same. They get spoonfed 'studies'.

[tritsofme]

3. They use to brag on their website that the Bush administration

implemented their entire agenda. Doubt it's there anymore.

[Viking12]

5. DeMint Has Destroyed Heritage’s Illusion of Intellectual Integrity

DeMint pulled back the curtain to reveal the true face of Heritage. That's why the founders are so upset; they've been outed as the hucksters they always were.

[OLDMDDEM]

6. The organization never had any.

I couldn't agree more.