Stephen Colbert on the austerity papers

[LongTomH]

You could read all the wonky papers about the Rogoff and Reinhart paper and it's refutation by Thomas Hendon, or.....you could just watch Stephen Colbert. Guess which is more fun?

[librechik]

1. still waiting for the correct response to this--apologies and international moves

to remove austerity principles from active consideration or implementation.

Maybe they're waiting for the noise to die down so they can just go back to what they were doing to poor people. No one will stop them. Certainly not the principle that the math is wrong.

[MoreGOPoop]

2. Is that the sound of angry masses

I hear gathering? It's not nice to bullshit 7 billion people.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

3. This was no "mistake"...

It was deliberate.

[CTyankee]

4. I emailed Morning Joe a couple of days ago asking when they were going to cover this

story, since they have been screaming about deficits, had a hate filled segment with Paul Krugman, dissed "deficit deniers," etc for a long time now. And I've been waiting for it tobe covered and it has not been! Goodness, I wonder why?

[FairWinds]

5. Yes, it was fraud

From New York Magazine . .

". . another UMass Amherst professor, Arindrajit Dube, followed up on Herndon's paper with additional proof that there were serious theoretical and causal problems (as opposed to just sloppy Excel work) in the Reinhart-Rogoff study."

R&R really need to lose their jobs - just as they facilitated the loss of so many other folks' jobs.

What weasels.

[harun]

6. I hope a lot of other people dig in to more of these "studies" cited by Conservatives.

Great work by Colbert in finding all those clips of top Conservatives referring to the paper.

[CTyankee]

7. That was wonderful and refreshing!

[freshwest]

8. New Oxymoron: Economic Science.

You know the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. They don't alter their views to fit the facts. They alter the facts to fit their views. Which can be uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering.

~ Tom Baker as Doctor Who