20 Sep 2010 0:18
Word of the Day: Toddfoolery [updated (3)]
Posted by Steve under Coinage , Estimation , News , Nonsense , Outrage[3] Comments
This, this, and this. Specifically, foolish nonsense from someone named Todd (Henderson).
The toddtipping point? Right after Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman suggests indirectly that the Drs. Henderson earn about $450,000 a year, which could subject them to $10,000/year in additional taxes under Obama’s proposal to postpone the upcoming expiration of the Bush tax cuts, but only on the first $250,000 of income.
Todd (who would prefer a bigger tax cut for 2011 than Obama’s legislation provides and who threatens to fire his $20/month legal Mexican gardener if he doesn’t get his way) scrumbles¹. Within a single paragraph, Todd refudiates refutes Krugman’s estimate of his salary (“not even close to our income on the high side”) yet sees no contradiction in describing the injury he and his wife would sustain from $10,000/year in additional taxes, which he just implied he won’t have to pay (because his salary is “not even close” to high enough to result in that increase).
Professor Henderson careens further out of control a paragraph later, when he inflates the fictive $10,000 figure by 20%, to $12,000.
All this from someone with degrees in both engineering and law, whose ability to explain (when it suits him, apparently) was recently rewarded with tenure as a professor. In light of the facts of his education, Todd’s behavior doesn’t pass the smell test. I’m calling it toddfoolery. Either something tragic has happened to Todd’s mind since he received his degrees and tenure, or he’s a disingenuous liar. At least those are the only explanations I can imagine.
Update (21 Sep 2010): Yesterday, Todd removed his tomfoolerific posts, along with readers’ comments to those posts,from Truth on the Market, where they had appeared. Todd explains.
Update (21 Sep 2010): Today, Todd “hung up his blogging hat”.
[Note: The links at the beginning of this post are no longer valid.]
Update (12 Nov 2011): An alternate spelling of Toddfoolery (Todfoolery) is now available here: Pity the 1%, and Their Tod(d)foolery.
¹ The verb scrumble will be coined in a future installment of “Word of the Day.”
September 20th, 2010 at 6:53 am
[…] He REALLY failed, no seriously, he is so screwed up in his demonstrations that even a nobel prize-winning economist got in on the act of sticking it to him over his method of trying to show how unfair it is. It got so good Steve Kass labeled it toddfoolery. […]
September 20th, 2010 at 8:17 am
It’s shocking. That guy probably HAD to go into academia because he was a huge failure as a lawyer. Just look at his resume:
“He then practiced appellate litigation at Kirkland & Ellis in Washington, D.C., and was an engagement manager at McKinsey & Company in Boston, where he specialized in counseling telecommunications and high-tech clients on business and regulatory strategy. His research interests include corporations, securities regulation, bankruptcy, law and economics, and intellectual property.”
How can he possibly do all that in a competent way if he doesn’t even understand the basics of taxation? It’s impossible. Seems to me that guy is hugely overpaid for his meager mental abilities. To imagine that students have to learn something from this jerk, it’s mindbuggling.
September 23rd, 2010 at 1:34 pm
BTW, I retrieved the post from Google cache:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:SYEa0C5sKoMJ:truthonthemarket.com/2010/09/19/now-i-know-i-must-be-right/+http://truthonthemarket.com/2010/09/19/now-i-know-i-must-be-right&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
Since these guys believe in self-responsibility and free speech (which I support as well), I think it’s only right that as many people as possible get to see how they think, since they have an enormous intellectual impact on one of our 2 main political parties. Words and ideas have consequences, and I’ve never seen any good from hiding them from the marketplace of ideas.