Let's see. You're an editorial board member of the vaunted New York Times. You get paid a lot. Is there at least an expectation that you get your facts right? I know--rhetorical question. It happens every day but sometimes there are just whoppers that need correcting--because they do make a difference.
In today's editorial "Taxes, the Deficit and the Economy", the editorial board comes to the defense of the president's recent jobs plan, and mocks "the usual silly talk about class warfare against the rich."
But, there are two errors that jump off the page in one sentence:
The full Bush-era tax cuts were the single biggest contributor to the deficit over the past decade, reducing revenues by about $1.8 trillion between 2002 and 2009.
First, no, the biggest single contributor to the fiscal shortfalls over the past decade were the two immoral wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As Joseph Stiglitz has demonstrated:
To date, the United States has spent more than $2.5 trillion on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon spending spree that accompanied it and a battery of new homeland security measures instituted after Sept. 11.
Whose figures do you believe? A Nobel Prize winning global economist OR The New York Times editorial board that can't even get...
...Right the difference between DEFICITS and DEBT.
MEMO TO THE TIMES (and this is error number two): When you talk about "deficit" you are speaking about an ANNUAL shortfall in the government's ledger. If you want to talk about all the deficits combined over a number of years, that is the DEBT. Can you please get this straight?
Why are these two points important?
First, maybe it's a coincidence that the Times' editorial board, which was an enthusiastic supporter of both wars (and only changed its tune, sort of, when the war didn't go so well, you know, "bombs bursting gloriously in the sky"...I wonder: did Arthur Sulzberger channel Sarah Palin and see Baghdad from his comfortable office while thousands died?), can not bring itself to admit the costs of the war. Nah, coincidence.
Second, and more to the current debate, The Times continues to be a loud voice for the obsession over the phony debt and deficit "crisis". It regurgitates the idea of "shared sacrifice" and "tough choices" throughout its coverage and gives outsized visibility to the voices of the hand-wringers of the "crisis".
The point is: this is an editorial board that can't even get straight the difference between DEFICITS and DEBT. If it could, it might understand that there is no crisis.
And to solve the long-term challenge--not "crisis"--of reducing our debt, calmly, while spending a lot more money today (far more than the president's meek proposal) to deal with the jobs catastrophe, the Times would get the other half of the equation right, along with ending the Bush tax cuts:
END THE WARS.