Hey minarchists! If you didn’t like the debt deal, I’ve got good news: the NYT hated it even more.
The deal would avert a catastrophic government default, immediately and probably through the end of 2012. The rest of it is a nearly complete capitulation to the hostage-taking demands of Republican extremists. It will hurt programs for the middle class and poor, and hinder an economic recovery.
Once again the MSM falsely conflates reaching the debt limit with the default, a Dem talking point designed to prevent at all costs a pause in spending. As a bonus, we get a false implication (the large majority of gov’t programs are for “the poor and middle class” just as income tax cuts largely benefits the rich because they pay most income taxes) and some Keynesian nonsense that no serious person should think applies after government has doubled in size since 2001 to no good economic effect.
UPDATE: And here’s why that big lie about “default” matters: Krugman (and others) can use it to claim the GOP committed “raw extortion.” One lie built on another…
UPDATE: Per request in the comments, here are the budget numbers.
Past: http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy05/hist.html
Future: http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy11/pdf/budget.pdf (p146)
You can see the budget of 1,864B in 2001 has doubled to 3,721B in 2010. (I’m not quite sure, though, whether both are being valued in the same dollars — it looks like the budget history is in constant Year 2000 dollars.)
Comments
3 responses to “Grey Lady Seeing Red”
Yep.
Nate Silver has a good post for NYTimes highlighting how small the immediate “cuts” are, but for the most part the deal is being lambasted as a capitulation to the Tea Party. It’s fun to see them all riled up, but that’s about it – if things stay bad in the next couple years you can be sure they’ll finally transition from blaming Bush to blaming the conservative debt ceiling deal for the poor state of the economy.
P.S. what’s some good data for claims like “government has doubled in size since 2001”? I’d like to get some good data on funding appropriations to compare these “cuts” against the growth in various sections from year to year…
How are we going to repay an ever increasing debt from an economy that is shrinking? The politics you ramble on about is so beside the point. Who cares if the Republicans get credit or blame? It’s like listening to Rush Limbaugh, enough to make sane people vomit.
If you want to know what is wrong and why we are in this predicament, listen to Sir James Goldsmith from 1994 predict exactly what has happened, and the social instability that is just around the corner:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5064665078176641728
Here is a much better YouTube video of Charlie Rose interviewing Goldsmith than the one above:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PQrz8F0dBI