Check out this howler. Marxist economist Brad DeLong presented a prepared statement opposing Social Security reform to the Democratic Policy Committee on Friday. Feeling correctly that his own credentials weren't sufficiently impressive, he quoted Warren Buffett -- and DeLong got the quote massively wrong. You see, DeLong wasn't really quoting Buffett at all -- he was quoting a fellow Leftist blogger quoting Buffett -- errors and all. Here's how DeLong presented the quote on Friday, according to his own website:
...a [Social Security] deficit of $100 billion a year, something, 20 years out, seems to terrify the administration. But the $400 plus billion dollars deficit currently does nothing but draw yawns.... [T]he idea that this terrible specter... a small fraction of the deficit we happily run now seems kind of interesting.... [T]he Bush Administration is ignoring the most serious economic problems facing America... ideological[ly]-driven.... The most serious fiscal issues are: the General Fund deficit, the current account / trade deficit, and health care. Why are we talking about Social Security?
But here's what Buffett really said, according to the transcript of an interview with Lou Dobbs:
...a deficit of $100 billion a year, something, 20 years out, seems to terrify the administration. But the $400 plus billion dollars deficit currently does nothing but draw yawns. I mean the idea that this terrible specter room looms over us 20 years out which is a small fraction of the deficit we happily run now seems kind of interesting to me.
All that other stuff came from "musenla" on the De Profundis blog. Here's what "musenla" added to Buffett's quote, himself making it seem that the words were Buffett's, not his own:
There is no question that the Bush Administration is ignoring the most serious economic problems facing America and that they are more interested in ideological driven issues. The most serious fiscal issues are: the General Fund deficit, the current account / trade deficit, and health care. Why are we talking about Social Security?
As of this writing, the error has not been corrected on either DeLong's site or on De Profundis. At least when I took DeLong to task for posting an outdated CV on his site -- which gave the false impression that he was currently a columnist for the New York Times -- he removed it. But I suspect this error will stay online for the ages. And will DeLong's misquotations help the Democrats defeat Social Security reform? Yeah, right -- just like his testimony in the disputed 2000 election helped Al Gore become president.
Update [5/17/2005]... The Calculated Risk blog claims to be the source of the text that DeLong misquoted. If so, then I apologize to Calculated Risk for not correctly acknowledging their authorship. However this in no way exculpates DeLong. In fact, it makes his error worse, since the quote was given correctly on Calculated Risk.
Update 2 [5/18/2005]... Calculated Risk has provided this link to a DeLong post from a week ago in which DeLong made the very same misquotation, ths time attributing it directly to Calculated Risk. In his his speech to the Democrats he repeated the error for the second time, without attribution to Calculated Risk. This makes the De Profundis blog entirely an innocent bystander, so my original statement above that it was the origin of the error was not correct. The fault is entirely DeLong's, based on distorting the correct quotation as originally found on the Calculated Risk blog.
Posted by Don Luskin on May 14, 2005 7:41 PM to Social Security Choice