FOX NEWS DEMAGOGUERY

This post will be vague, useless, and cranky.

Yesterday, listening to C-Span radio's replay of Fox News Sunday, I was surprised at how utterly ridiculous Tony Snow's final commentary was. He made two points: economic forecasts are imprecise (he called them "bunk" or something like that and counseled his audience to disregard all predictions of the economic results of the tax cut as the pronouncements of self-aggrandizing who want to play God), and "the American people" are really the source of all goodness in the country.

Tony Snow is an idiot. All forecasting is a matter of making your best guesses on the basis of available information. It's bound to be imprecise. But forecasts are also used by economic actors in order to make investment decisions (presumably Tony Snow would say that such actors are more virtuous than politicians and thus more reliable). And more fundamentally, Snow levels the difference between risk and uncertainty.

But his commentary had nothing to do with an appreciation of the weaknesses of economic forecasts, or with an understanding of the intersection between politics and economics; rather, the point of his commentary was to flatter the American public and to make it sound as if only he, Tony Snow, could pierce through the web of deceptions created by unscrupulous and power-hungry politicians. In other words, you can't trust politicians, but you can trust the news media to show where politicians are wrong.