July 02, 2011
The Washington Post once again shows why it is known as “Fox on 15th Street.” It begins an article on the government shutdown in Minnesota:
“There is a giant gap between what many of the world’s governments have promised and what they can afford. Now, the headlines from the across the United States and overseas show what happens when the clunky machinery of democracy goes about trying to close that gap.
“The latest: The Minnesota government shut down Friday, locking families out of state parks on a normally busy holiday weekend after the Democratic governor and Republican-controlled legislature failed to reach agreement on whether to close a projected $5 billion budget deficit in part with tax increases.”
As folks who looked at the graph in the last piece know, this bit of editorializing has nothing to do with the Minnesota budget crisis. It is just one more instance where the Post shoved its editorial position about budget problems right into the middle of a news story.
On the larger point about “many of the world’s governments” the Post is also misleading. A main source of the budget problems facing governments at all levels is the economic collapse caused by the bursting of housing bubbles in the U.S., Ireland, Spain and elsewhere. (The folks at Fox on 15th have not been told yet about the housing bubble. They still rely on the chief economist at the National Association of Realtors as their main expert on the housing market.)
If the world economy was operating at normal levels of output, most countries would have manageable budget deficits. In the case of the United States, the long-term budget deficit is the result of its broken health care system. If we paid the same amount per person for our health care as other wealthy countries, the long-term budget projections would show a surplus, not a deficit.
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