June 08, 2010
The lead Washington Post editorial complained that the pro-stimulus crowd is not supporting its plan to cut Social Security benefits or to raise taxes on the middle class as a path to deficit reduction, insisting that this means they are not serious about reducing the deficit in the long-term. In fact, many progressives have supported measures that would address the long-term budget problem with items like a financial speculation tax.
There are also measures that would substantially reduce health care costs like publicly funded clinical drug trials which could allow all drugs to be sold as generics for $4 per prescription. This would save hundreds of billions annually in spending on prescription drugs. We could also allow Medicare beneficiaries to buy into the more efficient health care systems of other countries, with the government and the beneficiaries splitting the savings. This could save trillions of dollars in the decades ahead.
However, the Post does not even want these ideas discussed since they could hurt the powerful interest groups whom they favor. Rather, the Post insists on measures that will low and middle income families.
It is also worth noting that the reason the deficit has soared in the last few years has been due to the collapse of the housing bubble. If the Post had not almost exclusively on economists who could not see an $8 trillion housing bubble as its sources and for its oped page content, it is possible that policymakers would have noticed the bubble and acted to rein it in before it grew large enough to wreck the economy.
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