A conservative limps back toward reality (aka "The unbearable dishonesty of the Wall Street Journal")

Another fine Murdoch enterprise

Conservative writer David Frum, famously author of the utterly idiotic "Axis of Evil" locution for George W. Bush (tying together Iran, Iraq and North Korea, which defied comprehension), has over the years spouted a lot of dangerous nonsense (mostly in the "neo-con" vein.)  Needless to say, he's not one of my favorite people.

But in recent months - maybe as "long ago" as the emergence of the analytically-challenged conservative spokes-model Sarah Palin - Frum has devoted himself to walking back the crazy. He's faced marginalization on the right for his efforts, after counseling uncomfortable notions like "compromise" with the President to his fellow Republicans.

So the guy who wrote the aggressively neo-conservative tract, "An End to Evil," with Richard Perle - which concept, since it doesn't even fly in the theologies I'm aware of, always struck me as a bizarre notion in the realm of foreign policy analysis - isn't far enough right for today's GOP.

This week Frum has written a provocative piece - for which he definitely gets kudos from me - on another nutty, dishonest Wall Street Journal editorial and frames his analysis in his own experience as a former WSJ editorialist.  The Journal, which has long been noted for the schizophrenia of a reliable news operation twinned with purely ideological extreme right editorials, is part of the scandal-ridden Rupert Murdoch media empire:

I used to write editorials for the Wall Street Journal myself, 20 years ago now.

So I’m well aware of the challenge faced by those assigned to compose these documents. The strict demands of the paper’s ideology do not always lie smoothly over the rocky outcroppings of reality. It can take considerable skill to match the two together.

In that regard, this morning’s lead editorial about the debt-ceiling crisis is a true masterpiece.

If you were to write a story about government debt, you’d probably be inclined to write about the two sets of government decisions that produce deficits or surpluses: decisions about expenditure and decisions about revenue. You’d want to do that not only as a matter of fairness, but also as a matter of math.

And that’s why, my friend, you would wash out as a WSJ editorialist. They wrote this editorial without any reference to revenues whatsoever.  Boom! Gone! Don’t deny reality. Defy reality...

One of the many traps and impediments facing a Journal editorialist writing about debt is that up until 2009, the US debt burden rose most under the two presidents the Journal most ardently supported: Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. The debt burden declined most under the presidents the Journal most despises – Dwight Eisenhower, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter.

How to deal with this troubling problem? It must have taken some searching, but the Journal managed to find a chart vaguely relating to debt that went up under Clinton and stayed flat under Bush. They chose chart 11.1 from the historical tables of the Offices of Management and Budget. (That’s more information by the way than the Journal included – I guess they wanted to enhance the treasure-hunting fun of those curious to check their work.)


You can see the original of the chart here: “Summary Comparison of Outlays for Payments to Individuals, 1940-2016, as percentage of Total Outlays.”

What’s so great about this chart is that it excludes two of the biggest federal spending programs: Medicare Part B and Medicaid, both of whose costs rose faster in the Bush 2000s than in the Clinton 1990s. Isn’t that ingenious? Would you ever have thought of doing that? Again – that’s why you would wash out. This is not a job for just anyone.

But maybe my favorite bit of the editorial is the solemn warning at the end that unless the US corrects its course, it may follow in the wake of Greece. The Greek crisis, as almost every economist published on the Journal oped page would acknowledge, is the product of the collision of heavy Greek borrowing against the hard constraint of the Euro currency. And guess which US newspaper was the most passionate advocate of the Euro currency? Guess which paper wants the US to be tied to some basket of commodities all the better to inflict Greek-like crises on Americans?

No, no, I wont answer. Like the Journal’s editorialist, I’ll follow the motto: the less said, the better.

Via Mark Thoma, "Economist's View"