Apparatchiks

Via Mark Thoma, Brendan Nyhan catches the Tax Foundation trying to disappear some apparently accidental honesty.

The story goes like this: the Wall Street Journal had a deeply dishonest editorial claiming that taxes on the rich can?t help with out budget problems. (Are you surprised?) There were actually multiple problems with the editorial; Jonathan Chait pointed out that it repeatedly compared apples with oranges, that if you actually read the numbers straight the editorial disproved its own point. None of this was surprising.

What was surprising was that the Tax Foundation, which normally produces a fair bit of disinformation itself, actually published a blog post pointing out that the chart accompanying the editorial was a classic case of how to lie with numbers. Was the Tax Foundation actually taking a stand for intellectual honesty?

Well, guess what: the blog post has now vanished ? although not before a number of people cached it. As the people at Heritage could have told them, memory holes just don?t work like they used to.

Obviously someone at the Tax Foundation forgot what their job was: they?re movement conservatives, and they?re supposed to serve the movement, not point out inconvenient facts.

And in a way we should be grateful for this episode, which clarifies what the Foundation is really about for anyone who might have been confused.

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Source: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/17/apparatchiks-2/

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