PROOF THAT THE ECONOMY IS IN BAD SHAPE….Like Matt Yglesias, I too don’t understand why the Washington Post would publish a piece on the state of the economy by Donald Luskin. It’s not just that Luskin is a hair-on-fire conservative idealogue. So is Charles Krauthammer, and despite the fact that I think the Post would be better off without him, I understand that Krauthammer carries a certain amount of intellectual heft and appeals to a certain crowd. The same really can’t be said of Luskin, who routinely makes mistakes like not accounting for inflation or discarding data points for no reason except that it helps prove some theory or other he wants to peddle. It’s sort of kindergarten hackishness compared to Krauthammer’s grad school hackishness.
So here’s my guess: the Post wanted to run a “balancing” piece in the Outlook section arguing that the economy was basically OK and Bush had done a good job running it. Apparently no one smarter or more intellectually honest than Luskin — which includes just about everyone — was willing to do it. Which should tell you something.
