David Atkins, at Hullabaloo makes the legitimate point that the punditocracy has insisted on treating expressed concerns about the deficit as real, when recent and current history establishes quite definitively that the deficit scolds (Krugman’s spot on term) are really only interested in slashing benefits for everyone who isn’t them. But I take issue, sort of, with this:
The fact that everyone in the Village Media has bought into the deficit obsession as it were a real thing rather than simply the latest iteration of a decades-long tactic designed to further enrich the wealthy shows not just herd mentality and willful blindness. It shows a craven willingness to go along with direct economic sabotage and shameless lying in the guise of politics as usual.
(via Hullabaloo)
Yes, they’re willfully blind, but with good reason. Just as “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”, it is easy to get him to parrot a lie when it enhances his financial position. We mustn’t forget, these folks are beneficiaries, albeit not to the grossly obscene extent as people like Romney, of the economic policies they claim we have no choice but to adopt. They are all rich, and they all benefit from low taxes on the rich. None of them need social security or Medicare or Medicaid, though to be fair, some of them know people who do. They just don’t care about them. They ignore and distort the truth because it suits their own purposes, as well as those of their corporate masters.
It would be wonderful if there were a law that required every pundit to disclose his or her net worth and annual income before allowing them to opine on anything.
Meanwhile, hypocrisy and deceit run rampant at the very epicenter of the Beltway. The Center for American Progress has proposed a long term (it’s in the long term that the deficit is a problem) solution to the cost of health care, which is the chief driver of the deficit. It involves squeezing money from the overpaid health providers and providing incentives for Medicare recipients to only go the doctor when they’re sick. No benefit cuts, just reductions in payments to bloated providers. But Republicans will have none of it:
Congressional Republicans call the approach wishful thinking. They argue that all health care programs, including Medicaid for the poor and Obama’s law covering the uninsured, must be on the table. They say any plan that walls off big portions of government health care spending is simply not credible.
(via Huffington Post)
These are the same Republicans who falsely claimed that Obama was cutting Medicare and only they could preserve the program inviolate. That was then, and this is now, and there’s nothing they’d like better than taking a crack at really cutting Medicare and, of course, turning around and blaming Democrats again.