On Sunday, the WaPo editorial pages finally woke up and realized that the GOP isn't serious about cutting the deficit.. On Monday, Jason Linkins at HuffPo took notice of the belated realization:
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.
But the Post? Not so much.
Then, today, Krugman weighed in as well:
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