October 10, 2010
Politico wrongly told readers that: “voters tells pollsters they’re worried about all the red ink in the federal budget, and Democratic centrists have grown more urgent in telling Obama it’s time to rein in federal spending.” This is not true.
A recent NYT-CBS poll found that just 9 percent of respondents said that the deficit was something that they were angry about. It is also inaccurate to identify Democrats who raise concerns about the deficit as “centrist.” They can more accurately be identified as Democrats with close ties to corporate interests. Their financing base is a far more obvious way to distinguish their ideological leanings.
The article also includes the bizarre assertion that: “liberals argue that it’s OK for the federal government to run up big deficits at a time of economic slowdown — $1.3 trillion this year — because it’s much more important to use government spending to inject some life into the economy, to help struggling families stay afloat.”
This is like saying that: “liberals argue that the earth is round.” While it is true, so do the vast majority of conservatives. The same is the case of deficit spending in the current downturn. Prominent conservatives such as Martin Feldstein and David Walker have also called for increased deficits in the face of 9.6 percent unemployment.
It is also bizarre that this article mentions cuts to Social Security repeatedly but never once discussed the possibility of raising the cap on the payroll tax or raising the payroll tax rate itself. Polls have consistently shown both policies to be far more popular with the public than cutting benefits. Serious news outlets are not supposed to just report on the policies they support.
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