The great Kaus vs Krugman war rolls on. The first round was about whether Krugman misstated the details of an allegedly cosy deal that Bush got in relation to his baseball team in Texas. The second deals with the saga of an Office of Management and Budget press release which grossly underestimated the impact of the Bush tax cuts on the Budget balance. Krugman called it a “lie” and Kaus says this is unfair, it’s really only a “mistake”.
Few will have the patience to wade through the details on such fine semantic points. The real issues in this feud are:
(1) Was Bush the beneficiary of a series of dubious deals in his Texas days ?
(2) Are the Bush administration’s budget projections honest ?
Unless Kaus can answer “No” and “Yes” respectively, his criticisms of Krugman are nothing more than nitpicking.