November 22, 2011
The NYT ran a piece in the news section bemoaning the failure of the supercommittee. The piece includes numerous assertions expressing the paper’s unhappiness with the failure of the supercommittee that have no basis in reality.
For example, it told readers:
“The failure of the committee — which had been dubbed, with typical inside-the-Beltway grandiosity, the — led to predictable, if bitter, kryptonite jokes. But it also prompted wrenching questions about whether Congress can be trusted to do its job: the committee, after all, was supposed to do the hard work that lawmakers had put off in August when they eventually agreed to avert default by raising the nation’s , waiting so long to do so that Standard & Poor’s lowered the United States’s credit rating.”
It’s hardly obvious that the failure has prompted “wrenching questions,” even if the NYT might want it to. It is also not clear that the immediate issue facing the country is the “hard work” of reducing the deficit. Given that there are more than 26 million people unemployed, underemployed, or who have given up looking for work altogether, it would be reasonable to conclude that the most pressing problem is getting the economy back on track. This would require more stimulus, the opposite of deficit reduction.
This is an opinion piece that belongs on the editorial pages.
Comments