May 05, 2011
In one of his debates with President Carter in 1980, Ronald Reagan famously quipped that everyone who supported abortion has already been born. In the same vein, it is probably worth noting that everyone who works for the Washington Post has a job. This may explain its fixation with reducing the deficit while virtually ignoring the most prolonged period of high unemployment since the Great Depression.
A front page article told readers that:
“With voters growing increasingly anxious about the debt, Republicans and some Democrats are refusing to approve additional borrowing without an explicit strategy to reduce deficit spending.”
Actually polls consistently show that jobs are far and away voters main concern. Furthermore, the most likely reason that voters might be “growing increasingly anxious about the debt” is that the media is constantly bombarding them with hysterical and often largely untrue pieces about the debt and its consequences.
This article refers to Representative Ryan’s plan for privatizing Medicare. It would have been useful to note that the Congressional Budget Office analysis of this policy projects that it would add more than $34 trillion (almost 7 times the size of the projected Social Security shortfall) to the cost of buying Medicare equivalent policies over the program’s 75-year planning horizon.
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