As spotted by Noel Sheppard of Newsbusters, some curious sophistry from the Times’ Nobel-prize winning/Enron-advising economist/far left political pundit, who today wrote:
What would real action on health look like? Well, it might include things like giving an independent commission the power to ensure that Medicare only pays for procedures with real medical value; rewarding health care providers for delivering quality care rather than simply paying a fixed sum for every procedure; limiting the tax deductibility of private insurance plans; and so on.And what do these things have in common? They’re all in last year’s health reform bill.
That’s why I say that Mr. Obama gets too little credit. He has done more to rein in long-run deficits than any previous president.
To which Noel responds:
Really? As ABC’s Jake Tapper noted Monday, the President’s recent budget forecasts $7.2 trillion in added debt over the next ten years, and this assumes economic growth far greater than anyone is predicting including the Congressional Budget Office.
Equally shameful, Krugman was advancing the myth that ObamaCare will reduce the deficit.
Good luck with that idea.
Beyond that, Krugman seems caught in a strange paradox here. This is the economist who in 2010 seemed to call for a New New Deal every other week — to the point where, as we noted earlier today, by the fall of 2010, he wanted to redo World War II. From that logic, isn’t fighting the deficit during an economic slowdown the worst thing the president could have done, when your fiscal worldview is built around the notion of Spend! Spend! Spend!
(Call it the “Louis XV budget,” to coin a phrase.)
Building on his earlier “MFM” sobriquet, Ace has recently taken to referring to the “Make-Believe Media.” But even a children’s storyteller knows that he has to have a pinch of internal logical to keep the suspension of disbelief alive.
Related: At the Tatler, “Video: Geithner admits the Obama budget is unsustainable.”
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