On his blog this morning, Krugman took a break from his hiking vacation to call out the "Unethical Commentary":

There are multiple errors and misrepresentations in Niall Ferguson’s cover story in Newsweek — I guess they don’t do fact-checking — but this is the one that jumped out at me. Ferguson says: "The president pledged that health-care reform would not add a cent to the deficit. But the CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation now estimate that the insurance-coverage provisions of the ACA will have a net cost of close to $1.2 trillion over the 2012–22 period."

Readers are no doubt meant to interpret this as saying that CBO found that the Act will increase the deficit. But anyone who actually read, or even skimmed, the CBO report (pdf) knows that it found that the ACA would reduce, not increase, the deficit — because the insurance subsidies were fully paid for.

Ferguson came back with a quibbling rebuttal: "But I very deliberately said 'the insurance coverage provisions of the ACA,' not 'the ACA.' There is a big difference." To which Joe Weisenthal of Business Insider scoffed, "So Ferguson's response was: Well, the spending/insurance portion of the Affordable Care Act did increase the deficit, and I was only referring to the spending side. I wasn't referring to the whole thing ... Niall Ferguson's defense is that he was being very obtuse and misleading."

Economist Brad DeLong is even harsher with regards to the ACA claim:

Fire his ass. Fire his ass from Newsweek, and the Daily Beast. Convene a committee at Harvard to examine whether he has the moral character to teach at a university. There is a limit, somewhere. And Ferguson has gone beyond it.

And that's just one minor point — it's only the very beginning. Ferguson's own Newsweek colleague Andrew Sullivan calls his "old and good friend" out for his "glaring omissions" and "sleight of hand." Sullivan promises, "More to come. The piece is sadly so ridden with errors and elisions and non-sequiturs it will require a few more posts."

At The Atlantic, and with the searing headline "As a Harvard Alum, I Apologize," James Fallows writes, "A tenured professor of history at my undergraduate alma mater has written a cover story for Daily Beast/Newsweek that is so careless and unconvincing that I wonder how he will presume to sit in judgment of the next set of student papers he has to grade."