July 11, 2011
Robert Samuelson did one of the great pox on both your houses pieces at which the Post excels. He criticized the right, as personified by Grover Norquist, for being unwilling to raise taxes. Then he trashed my friends at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities for refusing to produce a balanced budget, which he argues would have to show large cuts in Social Security and Medicare.
Those of us who don’t work for the Post, and therefore are free to speak honestly about the deficit, know that the whole long-term deficit problem is the story of the broken U.S. health care system. If the United States paid the same amount per person for its health care as people in any other wealthy country we would be looking at long-term budget surpluses, not deficits.
Of course the short-term deficit story is about the downturn caused by the collapse of the housing bubble, which the Post apparently still has not noticed.
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