December 09, 2013
According to the Congressional Budget Office, the country is foregoing close to $1 trillion a year in output because the budgets produced by Congress do not provide enough demand to bring the economy to full employment. These losses are disproportionately incurred by minorities, the young, and the poor, since these are the groups most likely to be unemployed or working fewer hours at lower pay because of Congress’s failure.
However, the failure of Congress to produce a budget that would spur growth and reduce unemployment never once got mentioned in the Post’s lead front page article. The only outside experts to give comments in the piece were Robert Bixby, the executive director of the Peter Peterson financed Concord Coalition and Gene Steuerle, who formerly was vice-president of the Peter Peterson Foundation.
While the article never discusses the impact of the budget on the economy, it repeatedly complains that the tentative budget agreement reached by the congressional negotiators doesn’t reduce the debt by as much as the Post would like. Most newspapers would keep such editorializing to the opinion pages.
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