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WaPo joins the opposition

August 31, 2009 in Politics-Obama | 1 comment

Now that the Washington Post is calling for pulling the plug on ObamaCare, or ObamaInsurance, one awaits the decisions of the last hold-outs among the legacy media, such as The New York Times. Will they continue to live in the fantasy land of the administration or will the (inevitably) conservative facts of life return them to earth, however reluctantly? For the Post it was the more than 20% upward revision of the federal debt over the next ten years. Even those numbers of $9 trillion deficits, coming as they are from the White House OMB, are suspect. The OMB and its director, Peter Orszag, have consistently prettified Obama economic statistics, and there are already calls that even this number is too optimistic by another trillion or two.

I disagree with one thing in the Post editorial. While the Bush administration indeed contributed to the deficit problem with various social programs like the Medicare prescription drug benefit, and while the Bush administration moved to get the bank bailout rolling, to give the Bush administration more than a small fraction of the blame for this year’s deficit and for current domestic proposals is covering for Obama. It was Obama’s choice to proceed with half of the proposed TARP funds. Moreover, as the column agrees, the stimulus was Obama’s. I disagree about the positive effect and the need for the stimulus that the column envisions. All of that should go into Obama’s column. One may disagree about the need for that spending, but putting the responsibility where it belongs makes Obama’s plans for additional deficits more clearly reckless.

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