U.S. Budget and Economy

Do Publications Have Any Responsibility to Screen Their Editorials? (Part 4) At the end of my last post , I said that it would be interesting to see if the Wall Street Journal finally corrects the online version of Brett Stephens's column, "Obama's Envy Problem" . As it happens, they have finally done so. I first noticed it when I rechecked the site after my last post late on January 20th. According to a blog post by Paul Krugman titled "Department of Corrections, and Not" , the column was still uncorrected when he checked it a few minutes before his posting at 1:40 PM on January 20th. Hence, the Journal may have corrected it shortly after that. I may have initially missed it because they posted the correction at the end of the column. The correction reads as follows: Corrections & Amplifications Inflation-adjusted income data from the U.S. Census Bureau show that incomes declined by 2.6% for the bottom quintile between 1979 and 2012, increase...

In my last post , I pointed out that the Wall Street Journal website is still displaying the same editorial with the same non-inflation-corrected numbers for which they had posted a correction. I concluded that it will now be interesting to see if the Wall Street Journal corrects it. As of this posting, the Wall Street Journal has still not corrected it and I was therefore happy to see Paul Krugman also take up this issue. On January 19th, a Krugman column titled "The Undeserving Rich" was posted on the New York Times website. In it, he stated: For an example of de facto falsification, one need look no further than a recent column by Bret Stephens of The Wall Street Journal, which first accused President Obama (wrongly) of making a factual error, then proceeded to assert that rising inequality was no big deal, because everyone has been making big gains. Why, incomes for the bottom fifth of the U.S. population have risen 186 percent since 1979! If this sounds wrong to...

At the end of my last post , I wrote: It will be interesting to see if Stephens or the Wall Street Journal publish a correction to this egregious mistake. That might give some indication as to whether they are concerned about their reputations or are simply pushing a point of view by whatever means possible. As it happens, a correction written by Stephens titled "About Those Income Inequality Statistics" was posted on January 3rd. In it, he admits his error in using data that had not been corrected for inflation, stating: In my Dec. 31 column on income inequality, I used a data set from the U.S. Census Bureau to make the case that incomes in the U.S. have been growing across the board, even if the incomes of the wealthy have grown faster than those of others further down the income scale. But I wrote those lines looking at a set of numbers that had not been adjusted for inflation. Professor Krugman, in a post on his New York Times blog, takes me to task for this. Had I...

On Dec. 30th, the Wall Street Journal ran an editorial titled "Stephens: Obama's Envy Problem" . The editorial was written by the WSJ's Bret Stephens and begins as follows: As he came to the end of his awful year Barack Obama gave an awful speech. The president thinks America has inequality issues. What it has—what he has—is an envy problem. Further on, Stephens states: Mr. Obama tried to prove that in his speech, comparing present-day income with that halcyon year of 1979: "The top 10 percent no longer takes in one-third of our income—it now takes half," he said, suggesting that the rich are eating a larger share of the national pie. "Whereas in the past, the average CEO made about 20 to 30 times the income of the average worker, today's CEO now makes 273 times more. And meanwhile, a family in the top one percent has a net worth 288 times higher than the typical family, which is a record for this country." Here is a factual error, marred ...