WaPo Editors Finally Realize The GOP Isn't Serious About The Debt
First Posted: 01- 3-11 12:37 PM | Updated: 01- 3-11 08:45 PM
For the better part of the past year, the editors of the Washington Post have been generically a-screech with worry over the deficits, and their insistence that the Obama administration needs to get serious about them. Well, today, the editors seem to have finally realized that the alternative is not much better, and that the GOP may actually not be all that serious about taming them either:
Are House Republicans serious about dealing with the deficit? You could listen to their rhetoric - or you could read the rules they are poised to adopt at the start of the new Congress. The former promises a new fiscal sobriety. The latter suggests that the new GOP majority is determined to continue the spree of unaffordable tax-cutting.
The ominous signs come in the wording of the new majority's version of its pay-as-you-go rules, which normally require that new programs or tax initiatives be covered with cuts to other programs or new revenue. In the GOP concept, pay-as-you-go applies only to spending programs. When it comes to tax cuts, it's all go, no pay. Taxes can be cut, and the national debt increased, without any offsetting savings.
The editors are referring to the new "cut-go" plan, which exempts tax cuts from the fiscal realities of the federal government's balance sheet. It seems to have caught them by surprise! Had they, say, availed themselves of their own paper's reporting, they might have caught a whiff of this coming from several million miles away. Let's check in with Washington Post reporter Lori Montgomery, circa September:
Even as they hammer Democrats for running up record budget deficits, Senate Republicans are rolling out a plan to permanently extend an array of expiring tax breaks that would deprive the Treasury of more than $4 trillion over the next decade, nearly doubling projected deficits over that period unless dramatic spending cuts are made.
For decades the Wall Street Journal editorial pages were famouse for this sort of thing, spouting off endlessly about an imaginary economic surreality of Laffer Curves, trickle down golden reigns of endless prosperity, self-regulating markets and tooth fairies, while its actual reporters did the best nothing-but-the-facts-ma'am business reporting money could buy, since they were writing for a business audience that had no desire whatsoever to be "spun" (aka deceived, taken for a ride, sold a bill of goods, etc.) when the result of dishonest reporting could well be financial disaster. The business model made perfect sense for the WSJ, whose readers presumably understood perfectly what was going on.
I was going to be snarky all the way here, but actually let's be serious: the gullibility of much of the media establishment on all this amounts to journalistic malpractice..
Republicans have, after all, been the party of fiscal irresponsibility since 1980; the GW Bush administration confirmed, if anyone was in doubt, that unfunded tax cuts are now in the party's DNA.
I think he might be talking about something related to this:
He continues:
Then along comes a Democratic president who presides over all of two years of deficits in the immediate aftermath of a severe financial crisis - which is a time when you're actually supposed to run deficits. Republicans begin inveighing against the evils of red ink - and, incredibly, get taken at face value.
One could criticize Krugman here for being a bit sloppy in failing to distinguish between news reporting and editorializing, as Linkins was careful to do, but Krugman's focus is intentionally much broader--he's talking about decades of fiscal policy, after all, and he's clearly not just talking about the WaPo in isolation, he's talking about them as a flagship publication, which has outsized influence and gets outsized respect as such, and which deserves outsized blame when it drops (or, perhaps hides?) the ball so egregiously.
Krugman goes on to hit a couple more points, including the latest big lie:
Oh, and for those claiming that Republicans have always said that spending, not deficits is what matters: first of all, this is very much revisionist history; you can't denounce the federal debt, then claim that you never cared about the revenue side of things. Beyond that, the deficit scare tactics lately have been all about solvency, not mere crowding out; repent, they said, or you'll turn into Greeeeeece.
That's a scare story about solvency, for which the deficit, not spending, is what matters.
Krugman, of course, is an economist, and confusing the terms of debate the way Republicans and Versailles journalists routinely do is literally just about unthinkable for him. He'd have to be reeeally drunk--I mean, Animal House drunk in order to talk the way they do. But they can talk that way all day long--indeed, they can go on for years, decades even, without ever realizing how truly full of shit they are.
In fact, what are the odds that this week's epiphany in the WaPo's editorial pages will have any lasting impact? I mean, what lasting lesson did they learn from discovering there weren't any WMDs in Iraq?
None whatsoever.
Chickenhawks. Deficit chickenhawks. The WaPo loves them, one and all. It can only stay angry until it's time to buy another round.
