August 03, 2011
Politicians don’t always tell the truth. Most school kids know this, but apparently the NYT believes otherwise. That explains why it tells us that:
“the reason that many conservative Republicans refused to vote for the [debt] agreement” was that the debt to GDP ratio would still rise even with the proposed cuts. Actually, this is what many conservative Republicans said. That is how it should be reported, as in “many conservative Republicans said ……”
The NYT also said that this is the reason the bond rating agencies are considering a downgrade of U.S. debt. Again, a newspaper reports this as “this is the reason that the bond rating agencies have given …”
The bond rating agencies do not have a great deal of credibility at the moment, having rated hundreds of billions of dollars of subprime mortgage backed securities as investment grade, and getting paid tens of millions of dollars in the process. No one can accept their claims at face value, especially since it is not even clear how they think the U.S. could ever default on its debt. (The debt is owed in dollars. The U.S. prints dollars. How could we be unable to pay our debt, apart from deliberate non-payment through failing to raise the debt ceiling?)
The piece also wrongly asserts that Social Security contributes to the debt. This is not true. Under the law, Social Security can only spend the money in its trust fund and not a penny more. If it runs short of money then payments would not be made. This is a very serious error that the NYT should not make. (It is clear that the article is referring to the on-budget budget, since it reports that CBO projects that the debt to GDP ratio will exceed 100 percent of GDP in 2021. This is only true if we look at the on-budget budget and add in the debt held by the Social Security trust fund.)
It would also have been useful if the article found at least one source who was not a deficit hawk. There are no shortages of economists, policy analysts and elected officials who fall into this category.
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