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6/06/2019
Mueller Report Commits fraud, alters quote from Trump lawyer John Dowd to make it look like he was pressuring witness
Apparently, we were just lucky that a judge decided to look at the underlying information himself. It raises questions of how many other times this type of fraud has occurred. From Fox News:
Dowd said there will likely be more discrepancies in the future stemming from the report.
“Isn’t it ironic that this man [Mueller], who kept indicting and prosecuting people for process crimes, committed a false statement in his own report,” Dowd said.
U.S. Rep. Devin Nunes called for the release of “all backup and source information” for the Mueller report on Friday after a newly released transcript of a former Trump lawyer's 2017 voicemail message included content that did not appear in a version that was part of the special counsel's Russia investigation findings.
Nunes, ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, was reacting to the release of a voicemail message that John Dowd, a former lawyer for President Trump, had left for a lawyer representing former national security adviser Michael Flynn, in which Dowd asks for a “heads up” if Flynn planned to say anything damaging about Trump to Mueller’s team.
Nunes retweeted a side-by-side comparison of the Dowd transcript text and the Mueller report text, suggesting that the Mueller report did not disclose the full Dowd message. The Mueller report had redacted the part of the voicemail where Dowd said he wanted the heads up “not only for the president but for the country” and that he wasn’t asking for “any confidential information.”
Piketty's incredibly weak response to the Financial Times finding of errors, Piketty doesn't directly address any of the problems
The Financial Times did a devastating job pointing to errors in Piketty's new book (I had an initial discussion available here). Now Piketty has published a response letter in the FT available here. If I were to summarize Piketty's response: it is a nonresponse and he doesn't deal directly with any of the problems raised.
On the corrected European data not showing an increase inequality since 1970, the problems were data not matching the sources that he claimed he obtained the data from, observations being used that don't exist in the sources he cites, and him linking series that are incompatible. His response is:
I certainly agree that available data sources on wealth are much less systematic than for income. . . . As I make clear in the book, in the on-line appendix, and in the many technical papers I have published on this topic, one needs to make a number of adjustments to the raw data sources so as to make them more homogenous over time and across countries. I have tried in the context of this book to make the most justified choices and arbitrages about data sources and adjustments. I have no doubt that my historical data series can be improved and will be improved in the future (this is why I put everything on line). . . .
First note that he doesn't directly respond to any of the critiques. He comes closest when he says that "one needs to make a number of adjustments," but a more helpful response from him would have been to specifically give one single example. His response clearly doesn't even try to explain data that isn't available in the sources he cites nor is this really a justification for why he would link inconsistent data series. For example, take Giles statement that: "Here’s a list of constructed data, where there appears to be no source or where the source is not described either accurately or fully." A response on the unexplained data would have been something like: if Chris Giles had looked at Appendix B in XXX, he would have clearly seen the source of the data for years XX and XX. An explanation for the adjustments would have read something like this: while the data in the original source XX doesn't show an increase in inequality, the reason that my series added 2 percentage points to the share of wealth held by the top 1 percent in the United States in 1970is largely due to my adjusting for YY and ZZ that were not accounted for in the original data source. Clearly, YY has to be done because of AAA. I would really appreciate if someone could point to one place where Piketty's letter actually addresses Giles' points.
As to the US data, again Piketty doesn't explain why he would arbitrarily add on percentages to the US data.
Finally he then says that all this data is really besides the point because it leaves out certain information, which if we had it, would surely show that he is correct ("Finally, let me say that my estimates on wealth concentration do not fully take into account offshore wealth, and are likely to err on the low side.").
Even Piketty's defenders, such as Neil Irwin at the New York Times, have had to concede that Piketty isn't really responding to the points raised.
Instead, the defense is one of tone rather than substance.
But in his e-mail to me, he wrote with an almost jovial tone: “Every wealth ranking in the world shows that the top is rising faster than average wealth,” adding, “If the FT comes with a wealth ranking showing a different conclusion, they should publish it!” . . .
Not only is this besides the point, it is also clearly wrong. As Giles notes:
Looking at the two papers by Wolff, which provide estimates from 1960 to 2010, the top 1 per cent wealth share appears to be essentially flat, going from 33.4 per cent of total wealth in 1960 to 34.6 per cent in 2010. Wolff’s papers describe a modest increase in inequality, significantly gentler than Piketty’s graph shows. . . .
Paul Krugman also takes Piketty's approach to defense and doesn't directly address Giles point that different series can show different results for the US. A proper response from Krugman would have been to point to why one measure is better than another. Krugman completely ignores the papers by Kopczuk-Saez and Wolff directly cited by Giles above. There are two other points to make: 1) The changes in inequality that Piketty is focusing on are small. I don't think that inequality is bad -- people are getting paid what others think that they are worth. But compared to historical values, the recent changes, even if Piketty was right, are small. 2) Despite people claiming that Giles points aren't that important, I think that anyone who looks at the graphs for the UK or the top 1 percent in the US will see that they make a big difference, though the top 1 percent of the US was already relatively flat. For Europe as a whole, the very small increases in inequality changes to becoming basically flat.
Piketty says the share of income going to the top 10% never fell lower than 60%, and since the end of the 1970s has returned to 70%, a level not seen in 70 years.But the data Piketty himself cites shows the top 10% share of wealth is no greater than 50%, and may be as low as 42%.
Giles writes: "This appears to be the result of swapping between data sources, not following the source notes, misinterpreting the more recent data and exaggerating increases in wealth inequality."
Below is the chart. The right-most portion of Piketty's blue trend line showing the share of wealth owned by the top 10% of Britons ends up well above what's suggested by the data, in red, that Piketty himself cites.
Meanwhile, just one official data point for the top 1% share of wealth aligns with Piketty's blue line. But Giles said the source of that data said it was not suitable for the kind of calculation Piketty is trying to make.
"Prof. Piketty ends his series taking at face value the level of the HMRC data,despite HMRC saying clearly the data is not suited for that purpose, nor is it consistent with the old Inland Revenue Series which Prof. Piketty uses for earlier years.This latter point is also clearly stated in the notes to the source data.". . .
The investigation undercuts this claim, indicating there is little evidence in Prof Piketty’s original sources to bear out the thesis that an increasing share of total wealth is held by the richest few.
Prof Piketty, 43, provides detailed sourcing for his estimates of wealth inequality in Europe and the US over the past 200 years. In his spreadsheets, however, there are transcription errors from the original sources and incorrect formulas. It also appears that some of the data are cherry-picked or constructed without an original source.
For example, once the FT cleaned up and simplified the data, the European numbers do not show any tendency towards rising wealth inequality after 1970. An independent specialist in measuring inequality shared the FT’s concerns. . . .
Professor Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia University said Prof Piketty’s “fundamental contribution” was the provision of data on the distribution of wealth. . . . .
Like many, Robert Shiller, a liberal economist at Yale, was not impressed with Piketty's solutions, but he was impressed with the data:
So what do Shiller and Stiglitz say now? They put a lot of weight on that data and the comparisons that were made. Now those same comparisons show the opposite of what they claimed do they reverse their positions? Paul Krugman believed that the book “will be the most important economics book of the year – and maybe of the decade.” Of course, there were lots of logical errors in Piketty's book, but these data errors mean that even ignoring those problems his data doesn't show the increase in inequality that he was claiming. As someone who hasn't put so much weight on these types of discussions, I don't really care what the results show on this, but for those who do, I will be interested in knowing how they handle this.
"IRS refunded $4B to identity thieves," 655 tax refunds to a single Lithuania address
Don't red flags go off when 655 tax refunds are sent to a single address in Lithuania? This gives one lots of confidence that government can run health insurance well. From the Associated Press:
The IRS sent a total of 655 tax refunds to a single address in Lithuania, and 343 refunds went to a lone address in Shanghai.
In the U.S., more fraudulent returns went to Miami than any other city. Other top destinations were Chicago, Detroit, Atlanta and Houston.
The IRS has stepped up efforts to fight identity theft, but thieves are getting more aggressive, said the report by J. Russell George, Treasury's inspector general for tax administration. Last year, the IRS stopped more than $12 billion in fraudulent refunds from going to identity thieves, compared with $8 billion the year before.
"Identity theft continues to be a serious problem with devastating consequences for taxpayers and an enormous impact on tax administration," George said in a statement. The fraud "erodes taxpayer confidence in the federal tax system. . . .
The St. Louis Federal Reserve has released a study showing $3.3 billion was made in over payments for unemployment insurance. It seems to me that this is just one type of fraud, not the type where people are lying about whether they are eligible and that all the information is properly reported. Identity fraud might also be occurring. With all the concern of the $44 billion in budget cuts from the sequester, this one type of fraud in one program equals almost one percent of those cuts. You would think that this would get some attention. From the St. Louis Fed:
Unemployment insurance fraud occurs when an ineligible individual collects benefits after intentionally misreporting his or her eligibility. Recent headlines have brought attention to extreme forms of fraud, such as the collection of unemployment benefits by prisoners. The dominant form of unemployment insurance fraud, however, is what's called concealed earnings fraud. This fraud occurs when individuals collect unemployment benefits while they are employed and are earning wages. The overpayments due to concealed earnings accounted for almost $2.2 billion in 2011, two-thirds of the total overpayments due to all categories of fraud. . . .
The New York Times misses the real academic fraud: How academic research is biased towards finding statistically significant results that aren't really there
Suppose that you do an experiment and you don't get the "desired results." So you redo the experiment again and you get the "right" results. Do you just report those results? It seems that many commonly practice this. The problem is that if you were to do an experiment many times, but only publish the one experiment that works, you have to adjust the statistical significance for the number of times that you redid the experiment. Suppose that you did the experiment 10 times and that one time you got results that were significant at the 10 percent level. Pretty obviously, you really didn't get statistically significant results. The New York Times in its discussion of Stapel's fraudulent research doesn't seem to understand this problem. Given that the others in psychology that were interviewed apparently view this as standard practice and assuming that is indeed the correct implication that they are giving, it means to me that the research in psychology is usually fraudulent.
Obviously there is a bias towards publishing research with statistically significant results in journals, and this bias creates the wrong incentives for academic authors. But it raises the question what if anything one can learn from most academic research. (BTW, it is one reason that I often try to publish redoing the different combination of control variables in my regressions.) From the New York Times:
The experiment — and others like it — didn’t give Stapel the desired results, he said. He had the choice of abandoning the work or redoing the experiment. . . .
The Lifeline program—begun in 1984 to ensure that poor people aren't cut off from jobs, families and emergency services—is funded by charges that appear on the monthly bills of every landline and wireless-phone customer. Payouts under the program have shot up from $819 million in 2008, as more wireless carriers have persuaded regulators to let them offer the service.
Suspecting that many of the new subscribers were ineligible, the Federal Communications Commission tightened the rules last year and required carriers to verify that existing subscribers were eligible. The agency estimated 15% of users would be weeded out, but far more were dropped.
A review of five top recipients of Lifeline support conducted by the FCC for the Journal showed that 41% of their more than six million subscribers either couldn't demonstrate their eligibility or didn't respond to requests for certification. . . . .
Congressional twitter accounts have large percentage of fake or inactive followers
Well, it looks like any simple comparisons over how popular candidates are by looking at their twitter accounts is highly problematic. From The Hill newspaper:
The tool also indicates that of Romney’s current 857, 260 followers @MittRomney, 12 percent are fake, 30 percent inactive and 58 percent "good." . . . .
Billions of US Tax Dollars going to Cuba and other foreign countries?
From Mark Tapscott:
Two U.S. senators and a representative worry that billions of tax dollars could be going to Cuba and other foreign countries via criminal schemes designed to defraud Medicare and Medicaid. The schemes often involve the use of “nominees,” individuals who are paid to be fronts for the actual owners of corporate entities being used in the fraudulent operation. By concealing the identities of true owners, the approach invites its use to funnel tax dollars out of the country. In a letter made public yesterday to Marilyn Tavenner, acting administrator of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid, senators Orrin Hatch, R-UT, and Tom Coburn, R-OK, were joined by Rep. Peter Roskam, R-IL, said they fear billions of tax dollars are being lost annually as a result. “Clearly, the program vulnerabilities that facilitate billions of dollars to be stolen from the Medicare program each year also allow for some of that money to be funneled to foreign countries,” the three congressmen said. “While the fraud itself is unacceptable, the loss of American dollars to foreign countries because of flaws in our system is totally unacceptable. The American people deserve the peace of mind to know that federal officials are doing everything they can to safeguard taxpayers’ dollars and the Medicare program.” . . .
Why do these 11 women keep having kids with this guy if they already know that he has so many kids that he can't provide more than $1.49 a month to many of them?
A U.S. District Court in Florida convicted a former Florida postal worker of health care fraud after she was caught participating in more than 80 long-distance races, including the Boston Marathon, all while taking workers' compensation for a back injury. Jacquelyn V. Myers . . . faces up to 15 years in prison. . . . In May 2009, Myers claimed to have a lower back injury that prevented her from delivering the mail as part of her job. She was relieved of her mail carrying responsibilities and put on "light duty." However, photos and videos emerged showing Myers participating in the races, including a triathlon. And in what would ordinarily be considered good news, her race times actually improved after she made her initial injury claim. . . .
How Democrats manipulated the supposedly nonpartisan California redistricting panel
At the very least it appears that the information upon which the redistricting was done was fraudulent. ProPublica has this explosive report:
In the weeks that followed, party leaders came up with a plan. Working with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee — a national arm of the party that provides money and support to Democratic candidates — members were told to begin “strategizing about potential future district lines," according to another email.
The citizens’ commission had pledged to create districts based on testimony from the communities themselves, not from parties or statewide political players. To get around that, Democrats surreptitiously enlisted local voters, elected officials, labor unions and community groups to testify in support of configurations that coincided with the party’s interests.
When they appeared before the commission, those groups identified themselves as ordinary Californians and did not disclose their ties to the party. One woman who purported to represent the Asian community of the San Gabriel Valley was actually a lobbyist who grew up in rural Idaho, and lives in Sacramento.
In one instance, party operatives invented a local group to advocate for the Democrats’ map. . . .
Are your tax dollars helping hide global warming data from the public? Internal emails leaked as part of “Climategate 2.0” indicate the answer may be "Yes." The original Climategate emails -- correspondence stolen from servers at a research facility in the U.K. and released on the Internet in late 2009 -- shook up the field of climate research. Now a new batch posted in late November to a Russian server shows that scientists at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit refused to share their U.S. government-funded data with anyone they thought would disagree with them. Making that case in 2009, the then-head of the Research Unit, Dr. Phil Jones, told colleagues repeatedly that the U.S. Department of Energy was funding his data collection -- and that officials there agreed that he should not have to release the data. . . .
The amount represents more than 10% of the $180 billion in jobless benefits paid nationwide during the period. (See a sortable chart of each states’ overpayments) The tally covers state programs, which offer benefits for up to 26 weeks, from July 2008 to June 2011. Layers of federal programs that help provide benefits for up to 99 weeks weren’t included.
The figures were released Wednesday as the Obama administration promotes its bid to reduce waste at federal agencies. The federal government foots the bill for administering the programs, and states are supposed to pay for the benefits. Many states exhausted their unemployment insurance trust funds during the long recession and slow recovery, prompting them to borrow from the federal government to replenish their funds.
Improper payments most often occur when recipients claim benefits even though they have returned to work; employers or their administrators don’t submit timely or accurate information about worker separations; or recipients don’t correctly register with a state’s employment-service organization. . . .
"Obamacare cost estimates hide up to $50 billion per Year"
Wow, this is fraud. To purposely not include such obvious costs should be a real scandal, and this adds up to a total of $500 billion more in total costs. So much for officially trying to keep the costs at around $1 trillion. From the Daily Caller:
Federal payments required by President Barack Obama’s health care law are being understated by as much as $50 billion per year because official budget forecasts ignore the cost of insuring many employees’ spouses and children, according to a new analysis. The result could cost the U.S. Treasury hundreds of billions of dollars during the first ten years of the new health care law’s implementation.
“The Congressional Budget Office has never done a cost-estimate of this [because] they were expressly told to do their modeling on single [person] coverage,” said Richard Burkhauser in a telephone interview Monday. Burkhauser is an economist who teaches in Cornell University’s department of policy analysis and management. On Monday the National Bureau of Economic Research published a working paper on the subject that Burkhauser co-authored with colleagues from Cornell and Indiana University.
Employees and employers can use the rules to their own advantage, he said. “A very large number of workers” will be able to apply for federal subsidies, “dramatically increasing the cost” of the law, he said. . . .
Of course, this also broke multiple Obama promises: that the health care bill wouldn't add to the deficit and what the program would cost when he ran for president.
Media Matters makes more false statements yet again
Media Matters makes more false statements yet again. This time they have a post with the headline: "Napolitano And John Lott Advocate For Allowing People To Carry Concealed Guns Without Permits." But the link that they have from my appearance on Judge Andrew Napolitano's show provides absolutely no such evidence. They have put up a video of about 2 minutes of a 4+ minute appearance that I have. The problem is that I never said that there should or should not be permits. Here is where Napolitano explicitly asks me the question about whether there should be permits starting at the 39 second mark.
Napolitano: I don't need to go to the court house and ask for a permit to exercise my free speech rights. What is gained by my going to city hall or the court house as the case may be in different places in America to get a permit to exercise my second amendment rights?
Lott: Well, I guess that those are the cases that are going to have to be coming down from the courts. The Supreme Court has only dealt with the very simple issue right now of whether a complete ban is constitutional or not. Can they ban an entire category of guns? But we see that some places require fees, large fees for getting guns. Some places require training. So there is a whole set of other issue. How much can they 'infringe'? How costly can they make it for people to be able to get guns?
There is an earlier answer that I give where I note how the law is in different states, but Napolitano's question isn't about advocating getting rid of permits and I am not advocating doing away with permits.
Napolitano: Should people be able to walk around with guns on their hips or under their jackets everywhere in the United States?
Lott: Well, we pretty much do that now. We have 48 states that to one degree or another allow citizens to be able to carry concealed handguns. We have 5 states now that people don't even have to have a permit to be able to do that. And the evidence is pretty consistent. Some states have had this for 90 years.
Here is the edited clip that Media Matters puts up. When I can find an unedited clip from the appearance I will put that up instead.
Review of recently doctored attacks on me by media matters:
Given that Media Matters has no problem using a doctored picture of me (editing the color of my hair, skin, and clothes and distorting my hair) presumably because they presumably believe that it makes me look bad, it is surprising that even people such as Paul Krugman and Brad DeLong never question whether Media Matters will use doctored screen shots of webpages.
A response to Paul Krugman's other false claims is available here.
A response to the above post by Media Matters is available here.
UPDATE: After getting caught redhanded, Media Matters' defense is that the just didn't realize that somehow they had posted a doctored picture. Media Matters claims to be an expert on the most minute details of my life, including frequent visits to my website where there is a picture of me, but at the same time they claim they had no idea what I really looked like and thus they blame someone else for having doctored my picture without their knowledge.
Media Matters claims that "Lott offers nothing to back up that assertion" that they will falsify photographic information. They have just been caught using a photograph of me multiple times that edited the color of my hair, skin, and clothes and distorting my hair. But heck they now claim that they didn't really know what I looked like. Media Matters instead tries reiterating their earlier claim that they hadn't altered one of my quotes after getting caught doing that also. Now they claim they didn't know what I looked like when they use a doctored photo of me, and they say it is fixed anyway because they have changed the picture. Sorry, but changing the photo after you have been caught doesn't undo what was done to begin with. For a website that has made it impossible for me to respond on their website to their many false claims, it isn't too surprising to see the way that Media Matters tries to extricate themselves from these false claims when they are caught.
Given that Media Matters has no problem using a doctored picture of me (editing the color of my hair, skin, and clothes and distorting my hair) presumably because they presumably believe that it makes me look bad, it is surprising that even people such as Paul Krugman and Brad DeLong never question whether Media Matters will use doctored screen shots of webpages.
A response to Paul Krugman's other false claims is available here.
A response to the above post by Media Matters is available here.
UPDATE: After getting caught redhanded, Media Matters' defense is that the just didn't realize that somehow they had posted a doctored picture. Media Matters claims to be an expert on the most minute details of my life, including frequent visits to my website where there is a picture of me, but at the same time they claim they had no idea what I really looked like and thus they blame someone else for having doctored my picture without their knowledge.
Media Matters claims that "Lott offers nothing to back up that assertion" that they will falsify photographic information. They have just been caught using a photograph of me multiple times that edited the color of my hair, skin, and clothes and distorting my hair. But heck they now claim that they didn't really know what I looked like. Media Matters instead tries reiterating their earlier claim that they hadn't altered one of my quotes after getting caught doing that also. Now they claim they didn't know what I looked like when they use a doctored photo of me, and they say it is fixed anyway because they have changed the picture. Sorry, but changing the photo after you have been caught doesn't undo what was done to begin with. For a website that has made it impossible for me to respond on their website to their many false claims by disallowing me to post responses, it isn't too surprising to see the way that Media Matters tries to extricate themselves from these false claims when they are caught.
Nearly 10 percent of all Medicare payments are fraudulent or otherwise improper, and the government isn’t doing enough to stop them.
That’s the conclusion of a Government Accountability Office report released Wednesday. The report, issued at the request of a House subcommittee investigating Medicare and Medicaid fraud, estimates that the federal government is losing $48 billion on the improper payments – a significant amount for a program that “is fiscally unsustainable in the long term” unless action is taken.
The report, prepared for a House Energy and Commerce Oversight Subcommittee hearing, said “CMS needs a plan with clear measures and benchmarks for reducing Medicare’s risk for improper payments, inefficient payment methods and issues in program management and patient care and safety.”
CMS estimates that $48 billion of estimated Medicare outlays of $509 billion in fiscal 2010 went to improper payments, including fraudulent ones. “However, this improper payment estimate did not include all of the program’s risk since it did not include improper payments in its Part D prescription drug benefit, for which the agency has not yet estimated a total amount,” said Kathleen King, director of GAO’s health care team. . . .
Barry Madoff's actions not only left him in jail, they also resulted in the suicide of his son. People who worked for Madoff even in relatively low leave positions are having real problems finding new jobs.
Even though Madoff's son turned in his father to the SE, the son couldn't get people to believe that he had nothing to do with his father's fraud. From the WSJ on Madoff's son committing suicide.
The ignominy of the Madoff name would come to haunt Mark Madoff in the two years after he and his brother, Andrew, reported their father to authorities on Dec. 10, 2008. Forty-six-year-old Mark Madoff spent that time trying to convince friends and the public that he was innocent of any wrongdoing during the 22 years he worked alongside his father, who was convicted of running a $20 billion Ponzi scheme.
He would make that point, according to a person close to the matter, as he sent a final message to his lawyer: "Nobody wants to believe the truth. Please take care of my family." . . .
Al Madoff has been living with his name for 82 years, and for most of that time, he said, his family moniker has been a source of pride. But recently, living openly as a Madoff has become much more complicated.
"You can't imagine what I go through with this name," said Madoff, a retired uniform salesman in Delray Beach, Fla. "I try not to mention it too often, really, because I don't want to get these stares or whatever."
Madoff has no relation to the disgraced swindler Bernard Madoff, currently in federal prison in North Carolina for orchestrating one of the largest Ponzi schemes in history. But the high-profile case and negative publicity surrounding it haven't made life any easier for Al and others who share the same last name. . . .
Low level employees for Madoff who had no involvement with the fraud also can't find jobs.
In the nearly two years he's been out of work, John Kelly has become an expert coupon clipper, reports CBS News business correspondent Anthony Mason.
"Other people are losing jobs for other reasons," Kelly told CBS News. "Mine is just somewhat unique."
Kelly worked for Bernie Madoff. He wasn't a high-level employee. His salary of $125,000 was modest by Wall Street standards, but for almost 10 years, up on the 19th floor of Madoff's firm, he worked on the trading desk as a liaison to brokerage firms.
"I still have nightmares or dreams that remind me of working there," said Kelly.
Kelly isn't sure what to think when people see the Madoff name on his resume.
"I don't know what people think," said Kelly. "I didn't have that kind of a position." . . .
