Since I’ve been giving Gary Gensler such a hard time for refusing to admit a mistake, I thought it would be appropriate to pointed out just how colossally I screwed up the math in my column on the Pentagon budget. (Lucky for me it was behind the sub wall!)
The correction, which runs in this week’s issue, is also behind a subwall, so I’ll post below in all its mortifying glory:
Correction: Those Pesky Decimals
There were three computation errors in Christopher Hayes’s March 2 “Cut the Military Budget.” The Pentagon budget request represents a 13 (not 12) percent increase over last year’s budget. The reported Obama Defense Department appropriation would represent a 2.2 percent increase over last year’s budget (not 8 percent). And regarding the F-22 Raptor fighter jet, $3.4 billion divided by 95,000 works out to $35,800 per job (not $35.8 million). So it is not true that “more jobs would be created by hiring people to shred the money.” We deeply regret the errors and have FedExed a new abacus to our Washington bureau.