"A newspaper fact-checks its own right-wing op-ed; hilarity ensues"

[bobabode]

KC Star editorial staff and Heritage binge drinking the tea and playing fast and loose with stats. "Oops", indeed.

http://www.latimes.com/business/hilt...05-column.html


"The Kansas City Star probably thought it was on solid ground when it published an op-ed by Stephen Moore defending the draconian, and economically debilitating, tax cuts instituted by Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback. (We reported on how the tax cuts have turned Kansas into a smoking ruin here.)
No-income-tax Texas gained 1 million jobs over the last five years...Oops. Florida gained hundreds of thousands of jobs while New York lost jobs. Oops.- Heritage Foundation's Stephen Moore on the effect of tax cuts on jobs. But all his figures are incorrect.

Moore's conservative credentials are impeccable: A former member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board, he's currently chief economist at the Heritage Foundation and a familiar face on Fox News and CNBC. So when his piece asserted that "over the last five years," the no-income-tax states of Texas and Florida gained jobs while the high-tax states of New York and California lost jobs, the editors waved it through.
Moore punctuated his statistical victory over Brownback's critics with the ironic refrain "Oops."
Oops, indeed.

It turns out Moore's statistics were dead wrong. He later explained that he was citing figures from 2007-2012, not the last five years. But--oops again--he got those figures wrong too. His errors were discovered by Yael T. Abouhalkah, a Star columnist, who took the simple step of cross-checking them against the source, the Bureau of Labor Statistics." LATimes