The Deficit Debate - Round 1

Note to readers:  The Deficit Debate is a collection of email exchanges about the deficit that took place among some of my blog followers in 2011.  Oldest posts are at the bottom

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From David to Paul et al

August 1, 2011

God didn’t say that.  However, he did give us the capacity to bring some principled thinking to bear on the question.  “We have always done it that way,” doesn’t qualify. Nor does “let the rich pay their fair share.”

Consider that since just about every economist in the country, liberal or conservative, agrees that marginal tax rates affect business investment (though they differ in their view of how much), and that investment patterns affect job creation.  These are principled considerations that we must weigh in deciding whether or not to spend, whether or not to tax, and the like.  Principles, about which we can disagree but which provide a basis for civil debate, are paramount.  

And consider a hypothetical application of the principle that marginal tax rates affect  private investment choices (which in turn affects job creation).

Assume an imaginary world in which Congress was choosing between two tax rates, a slightly higher one that had historically been the case and a slightly lower one.  And assume further, in this imaginary world, that Congress knew to a certainty that if it picked the lower rate, doing so would result in an extra million jobs per year in the economy, for twenty years running.  Got it?  Twenty million additional jobs from choosing the lower over the higher marginal rate.

Whether you were convinced that the lower tax rate bore a causal relationship to the enhanced job creation or not, you would, knowing that the consensus among economists across the political spectrum sees a connection, have to consider the question.  You may conclude that there is a causal link, and therefore that the lower rate was the superior choice, or that even with the causal link, other considerations decisively weighed in favor of the higher rate. Or you may, after giving the premise consideration, conclude that there was no causal relation at all.  We are likely to disagree about which is the right answer, but surely we all agree that there is no getting around the imperative – the principle, if you will -- of considering the matter of whether and to what extent the causal connection of jobs, investment decisions and job creation.

We pay all those economists a lot of dough, so we need to at least consider what they, collectively, offer up.  That’s not ‘appeal to authority,’ which I don’t like, but rather an appeal to common sense.  When a lot of smart people who have thought about an issue agree, you have to at least consider that they may be right)

Interestingly, there is a real world experiment in which that very decision tree about taxes and job growth can be applied and, to some extent, tested for validity.  For the two or three decades preceding the current recession, the relatively low taxed US economy created an average of one million private sector jobs per year more than the relatively high taxed and roughly similarly sized EU produced.    (this is from memory but I am certain of the order of magnitude difference). 

The point here is not to convince anyone that lower taxes drives investment that in turn drives job creation (having practiced tax law for 20 years, I can tell you that it did in my world).  Rather it’s to contrast (i) the integrity of a discussion about taxes that tackles this job creation nexus with (ii) a not very useful discussion about taxes based on what seems fair, or seems this or seems that, or what they do in Europe (Greece, anyone? Italy? Spain? Ireland? Portugal?).   Many of our fellow citizens (and perhaps some on this email) are unemployed or stand on that precipice.  I for one will base, or certainly try to base, my views about taxation and the like on what it does for jobs. [and, no surprise, I’m sure, to the cheap seats, I am passionately, for reasons of job creation, in favor of low taxes]

Thanks for listening.

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Paul E.

3:08 PM (1 hour ago)

And God said, “Thou shalt not spend more than 15 percent of the GDP on Federal expenditures.”

Who are we to argue with God?

Or was that Grover Norquist?  Pretty much the same.  

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Kevin

2:32 PM

. . ..faith. . isn’t that viable political philosophy for a significant portion of the House, these days? 

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From:  Hillary

2:02 PM

It's really misleading to say that if our spending level were at 2001 levels we'd have no deficit, at least if you're comparing 2001 spending to 2010 revenues. The revenues have grown by two factors that have nothing at all to do with policy: inflation and population growth. In constant dollars (adjusted for inflation), we would have a deficit if we had had 2001 expenditures ($2072.7billion) and 2010 revenues ($1929.2billion). The population has grown by 8.8% since then, so if I multiply 2001 spending by that figure, I get $2255.14 billion. So: an even larger deficit.

There are also obvious reasons why spending has changed since 2001. As noted, two wars and an unfunded prescription drug program helped. But also, the population is getting older, which means more spending on Medicare, and health care spending is (as always) rising at a faster pace than GDP or inflation (ditto).

Ezra Klein has a bunch of good charts about the contributions of various policies to the deficit here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/the-past-present-and-future-of-the-deficit/2011/05/19/AF2GsB7G_blog.html

(Note that in the Pew graph, that big brick red bit called 'technical and economic adjustments (revenue) basically means: there's a recession, so people are making less money, so tax receipts fell off a cliff.)

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David from Carroll County       

12:57 PM (3 hours ago

"So unless you can give a principled argument for why spending now is fundamentally different from 10 years ago in terms of what the proper role of government is, there is no argument for raising taxes as the primary strategy."

The two wars. This is the first time in US history we were at war with no increase in taxes.

Also a new Medicare benefit (drug coverage) and homeland security.  Both enacted without provisions to pay.

           

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David B

12:22 PM (4 hours ago)

If our spending level were at 2001 levels we would have no deficit. None.  Not a penny.  Federal government spending as a percentage of GNP has grown since then from 18-20 percent (the historic norm over the last few decades) to around 25 percent.

So unless you can give a principled argument for why spending now is fundamentally different from 10 years ago in terms of what the proper role of government is, there is no argument for raising taxes as the primary strategy.

And that point about the rich paying their fair share is a red herring.   First of all, if you taxed the top 1% of earners at 100% of their incomes, it would raise a trivial amount of money as a percentage of either the budget or the deficit.  Second, the percentage of income taxes paid by the top 5% wage earners has grown from something like 20%  of all income taxes to something like 35%.

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David B           

12:04 PM (4 hours ago)

           

You are missing the point.  All that money is spent.  Fix blame as you wish.  What is our president proposing NOW, for this year and next?  The same high level of deficit spending.  It’s President Obama’s responsibility to gear this juggernaut back, and yet he is giving no sign of even appreciating how outsized our spending is relative to our resources.   We are spending ourselves into insolvency.  Look at a graph of our spending and the growth of our cumulative debt.  It’s an unmistakable example of the truism “an unsustainable trend cannot be sustained”  You can ignore reality, but you can’t ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.

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From: pwonk

11:16 AM (5 hours ago)

Hi David -

You are mistaken about Obama’s “runaway spending”.   Remember, he started out with a structural deficit of $642 billion inherited from George W. Bush, not to mention the worst recession in 80 years.  The $1,550 deficit in 2009 consists of the following additional elements:

(1) The recession decreased tax revenues by $415 billion,

(2) It also increased mandatory spending (over which the White House has no control) by $421 billion. Some of the increase in mandatory spending was for recession related things like increased expenditures for unemployment benefits, Medicaid, food stamps etc.  Most of the rest was due to the bailout of the banks, auto industry, and AIG (TARP) and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (GSE).  Both of those bailouts were signed into law by George W. Bush in 2008.

So, to do the arithmetic:          

(1) Deficit inherited from Bush                                                $642

(2) Recession related loss of tax revenues                               $415

(3) Recession-related increase in Mandatory Spending            $409

(4) Increase in discretionary spending                                        $84

          2009     DEFICIT                                                      $1,550

Obama’s “runaway spending” amounted to the $84 billion in discretionary spending, the only part of the budget over which he had direct control.

Details are available in my blog

http://pwonk.blogspot.com/2011/07/solving-devicit-part-ii.html

and in Excel worksheets I have posted at  Google Docs. 

https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B8Whd9XSVnePZmVjZGI3YTEtZjEyOC00MDcxLWE0ZGItYWVhNjMwYTYxZTJl&hl=en_US

Each workbook contains an index with clickable hyperlinks to the data sources for specified Tables.  The hyperlinks do not work in Google.docs but will work if you download the document to your computer and open it in Excel.

Enjoy

Jim

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From: pwonk to David B. 

Sent: Sunday, July 31, 2011 6:31 PM

My comments re: are in red:

Jim

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But for the likes of Krugman, Melber and Rosen, down-the-middle journalism is the problem. They want the press corps to accept their own political doctrines as the truth and to treat anyone who departs from them as, in Krugman's words, "insane."

Not what Krugman really says.  Straw man tactic. My (and, I believe, Krugman’s) complaint is that the media do not go beyond quoting both sides and fail to do the time-consuming work of actually studying the issues and providing readers with information that would allow them to make informed decisions.  As a result, the average voter is poorly informed and tends to support issues on the basis of simplistic ideological positions.  Consider these findings from a recent Washington Post poll on the debt ceiling:

·      78% worry that raising the debt limit would “lead to higher government spending and make the national debt bigger”

·      75% worry that not raising the debt limit would hurt the economy.  At the same time, 47% are worried that the debt limit will be raised.  Go figure!

(the actual poll results are below)

I believe Krugman is saying that the media have failed to provide the public with the information they need to make a reasonably informed assessments of the issues of the day.  I am talking about the kind of information that I provide in my blog, such as:

TABLE I-1

	Constant 2005 Dollars
	Debt at End of Term(s)	Total Increase (Decrease) in Debt	% Contribution to 2008 Debt
All Other	$1,512		28.4%
Reagan	$3,065	$1,552	29.2%
GHW Bush	$3,907	$842	15.8%
Clinton	$3,836	($71)	-1.3%
GW Bush	$5,325	$1,489	28.0%
Total			100%

NOTE 5 -  Current dollar data are from 2012 Budget of the United States, Historical Tables, Table 7.1.  Workbook 2[7-1].  Constant 2005 dollar figures were calculated by dividing the current dollar amounts in Workbook2[7-1] by the dollar deflator index from Table 10.1 (Workbook2[7-1])  

TABLE I-2

On-Budget Spending and Tax Revenues as a % of GDP
	Revenues	Spending	Surplus (Deficit)
1960  (End of Eisenhower Administration)	15.8%	15.7%	0.1%
1968  (End of Johnson Administration)	14.7%	17.9%	-3.2%
1976  (End of Nixon/Ford Administrations)	13.3%	17.3%	-4.0%
1980  (End of Carter Administration)	14.8%	17.5%	-2.7%
1988  (End of Regan Administration)	13.3%	17.2%	-3.9%
1992  (End of Bush I Administration)	12.6%	18.1%	-5.5%
2000  (End of Clinton Administration)	15.7%	14.8%	0.9%
2008   (End of Bush II Administration)	13.0%	17.4%	-4.4%
Change from Eisenhower to Bush II	-2.8%	1.7%

NOTE 8 -  Table I-2 is based on 2012 Budget of the United States, Historical Tables, Table 1.2.  It is in Workbook 2[Table I-1].  

NOTE 9 - Deficit is shown in pink.  Data Source:  2012 Budget of the United States, Historical Tables, Table 1.2.  See Workbook (2) [1-2%] Workbook (2) [Index] and click on “Figures I-3 and III-1 SOURCE DATA” to see the Table on which Figure I-3 is based.

It could be argued, of course, that data can be chosen selectively and that people can lie with data just as well as without it.  My  response to that is the public would be better off with data than without it as long as it was properly documented so that any reader would be able to check original sources.  Obviously, few readers would do so, but some would.  And if we held media to this higher standard, the debate would be better informed than at present when it barely rises above the level of people shouting slogans at one another such as  “taxes are bad” and “government spending is out of control”. 

The late Sen. Paul Wellstone of Minnesota was a man of the hard left. . . . Wellstone died in a plane crash in 2002, and was immediate [sic] lionized. The Washington Post called him one of the Senate's "leading liberals. . . . Colleagues from across the political spectrum praised Wellstone as a passionate advocate for his beliefs." He was "a hero to the left," the paper said, noting "there was little doubt where his heart lay." To The New York Times, Wellstone was "a rumpled, unfailingly modest man," a "firebrand," and although "his opponents always portrayed him as a left-wing extremist," Wellstone was "so happy, so comfortable, so unthreatening that he was able to ward off the attacks." Rumor has it he once fed a crowd with five loaves of bread and a couple of fish.

This is not, to put it mildly, how Tea Partiers and their congressional cohort have been portrayed during the recent game of chicken over the debt ceiling. Rather, those opposed to raising the debt ceiling--or willing to do so in exchange for a slowdown in the rate of government growth--are "obstreperous," "flatly and dangerously wrong," and "not interested in governing." (These are all quotes from major media organs, not obscure blogs.) They're "crazy" proponents of a "dangerous delusion"--"ridiculous," "extremist," "ultraorthodox tax haters," players of "ideological games," "totally unrealistic," authors of "madness," etc. etc.

Hey, what happened to people of conviction? Aren't the Tea Partiers "firebrands"? Isn't there little doubt where their hearts lie?

Indeed, here's Paul Krugman eulogizing Paul Wellstone in October 2002:

Paul Wellstone took risks. He was, everyone acknowledges, a politician who truly voted his convictions, who supported what he thought was right, not what he thought would help him get re-elected. He took risky stands on many issues: agree or disagree, you have to admit that his vote against authorization for an Iraq war was a singularly brave act.

Can't the same be said of, say, Rep. Michele Bachmann and her determination to vote against increasing the debt limit (a position with which, we suppose we should note, this column disagrees)? Instead, in January Krugman lied and accused her of using "eliminationist rhetoric."

The section in yellow highlighting misses the main point of Krugman’s complaint which can be summarized in a single sentence from his op-ed piece:  “Some of us have long complained about the cult of “balance” the insistence on portraying both parties as equally wrong and equally at fault on any issue, never mind the facts.”  And it is the dearth of facts in contemporary policy discussions that is the key problem.  The average voter is flying blind and this does not make for good public policy.   Krugman doesn’t talk about Wellstone or the Tea Party at all in his piece and, if he has expressed the opinion that Tea Partiers are crazy, his columns have least provided readers with the evidence and the reasoning underlying his assertion - at least to the extent permitted by 800 word op-ed pieces.   The media allow even the most flagrantly untrue or distorted statements to go unchallenged.  Surely it is not too much to expect that they would inform readers when a policitician is saying something that is patently untrue.

I have grave concerns that the US is about to embark on a long, steady decline from its current status as the world leader in economic and intellectual achievement.  An alarming percentage of the population seems possessed by the mania that cutting taxes and spending must be the highest priority even if it means that we fail to make the investments in education and infrastructure that are essential if the US is to compete effectively in the world economy.   The US is already falling behind other developed countries on standardized tests of basic math and science and a report from the American Society of Engineers published in the Washington Post on Thursday indicates that deteriorating infrastructure is already costing the country $240 billion a year. 

 The Bachmann-Wellstone comparison is apt, for she, like him, is ideologically at the far end of her party. She was one of only nine House Republicans to vote against the Cut, Cap and Balance Act, because it included a debt-ceiling hike. This is not a big enough bloc to hold the balance of power in the current Congress.

When Krugman and like-minded lefties refer to the "insane" Tea Party Republicans, they have in mind a larger group: a group big enough, and sufficiently willing to compromise, that they can push the ultimate resolution of the current standoff in a rightward direction. They wish that the media not only would take sides but had the power, by taking sides, to win this for Obama and the Democrats.

That was the outcome when the last Democratic president engaged in similar brinksmanship with a Republican Congress, in 1995 and 1996. Many things were different in those days, but one was a far more uniform media environment. Rush Limbaugh was around, but not Fox News or the blogosphere. In those days you didn't hear lefties complain that the mainstream media were too balanced. Yet if anything, they have become more unbalanced. (Krugman, for example, had not yet been hired by the New York Times.)

 Suppose that tomorrow CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, the Associated Press and the news sections of the Times and the Washington Post all changed their journalism so that their reporting was as unbalanced as Krugman's columns. Would that win the day for Obama? We very much doubt it. Rather, it would drive the size of their reader- and viewership toward the levels of The Nation and MSNBC, which are not exactly powerhouses of influence.

 What the self-styled opponents of balance really want is something resembling a state media monopoly--but one that is nominally independent and that is pliant when liberals run the government and adversarial when conservatives do. That is more or less what existed between the 1970s and the late '90s, when competition greatly weakened the authority of the formerly mainstream media. Strident leftism is not going to restore that authority.

 ===========================

Here are the actual results of the poll:

This poll was conducted for The Washington Post and the Pew Research Center by telephone July 7 to 10, 2011, among a random national sample of 1,007 adults, including users of both conventional and cellular phones. The results from the full survey have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus four percentage points. Sampling, data collection and tabulation by Princeton Survey Research Associates International (PSRAI) of Princeton, NJ.

*= less than 0.5 percent

1. How well do you feel you understand what would happen if the government DOES NOT raise the federal debt limit?  Very well, fairly well, not too well or not at all well?

                   ------- Well ------   -------- Not well --------

               Very   Fairly    Not too   Not at all   No opinion

7/10/11     18      37            27            14              4

5/22/11     18      32            26             21             3

2. How concerned, if at all, are you that [INSERT]? Very concerned, somewhat concerned, not too concerned or not at all concerned?

a. Raising the debt limit would lead to higher government spending and make the national debt bigger

      --- Concerned ---   --- Not concerned -    No 

              Very   Smwt  Not too   Not at all   opinion

7/10/11     51     27          12          7             2

5/22/11     47     30         10         10                       2

b. Not raising the debt limit would force the government into default and hurt the nation’s economy

     --- Concerned ---   -- Not concerned ---    No 

             Very   Smwt   Not too   Not at all   opinion

7/10/11    44     31         13             10          2

5/22/11    37     36         13              10          4

3. All things considered, which of these is your greater concern (that raising the debt limit would lead to higher government spending and make the national debt bigger) or (that not raising the debt limit would force the government into default and hurt the nation’s economy)?

          Raising debt limit   Not raising debt limit     No

          a greater concern      a greater concern      opinion

7/10/11           47                                 42               11

5/22/11           48                                 35               17

Posted by Policy Wonk at 4:13 PM

0 comments:

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From David B. 

On Sat, Jul 30, 2011 at 3:56 PM,

    Here is another take on Krugman’s thesis:

    By JAMES TARANTO (WSJ)

    Balance is supposed to be a good thing, which is why President Obama keeps using "balanced approach" as a euphemism for what he has also more bluntly described as "massive, job-killing tax increases."

    At the same time, however, some of Obama's most fervid supporters are complaining that there's too much balance--in the media. On the New York Times website, Paul Krugman rants that "the cult of balance" has "poisoned our political system":

    Think about what's happening right now. We have a crisis in which the right is making insane demands, while the president and Democrats in Congress are bending over backward to be accommodating. . . .

    So what do most news reports say? They portray it as a situation in which both sides are equally partisan, equally intransigent--because news reports always do that. . . .

    The reality, of course, is that we already have a centrist president--actually a moderate conservative president. . . .

    You have to ask, what would it take for these news organizations and pundits to actually break with the convention that both sides are equally at fault?

    The amusingly named Ari Melber, writing in the magazine The Nation, echoes the theme, complaining that reporters are "nursing Balance Bias." He quotes extensively from Jay Rosen, a New York University scholar who gives an intellectual gloss to the complaint that the media are insufficiently biased in favor of the left:

    Rosen, a prolific media critic who has a theory, developed in a series of essays that are both elegant and reproachful, that today's political reporters are on a futile "quest for innocence" when reporting political disputes. By innocence, Rosen means "a determination not to be implicated, enlisted or seen by the public as involved." I asked him how that works on this debt story.

    "Asymmetry in a highly contested situation fries the circuits of the press," Rosen said via e-mail this week. "The bigger the stakes, the more dangerous it feels for reporters to reflect that asymmetry in their accounts," he proposed. That makes sense, since often it's "the big lie" that gets more traction than little fibs. So the political press rebuted [sic] Sarah Palin's spin about opposing "The Bridge to Nowhere" in 2008, a low-stakes example, but they back down on a market-shaking feud like the debt fight. And Rosen suggests that while Democrats or Talking Points Memo or Eugene Robinson may call out the problem, that doesn't actually do much.

    "The people screaming about an asymmetrical situation that has been artificially balanced are likely to be on one side of the contested ground, right? This fries the circuits even more, adding to the danger [for innocent reporters]," he says. This is also your brain on Balance Bias.

    This is a fascinating development. Conservatives have spent decades bellyaching about media bias, but their complaints have become less bitter in recent years with the rise of alternatives outside the so-called mainstream media: talk radio, independent bloggers and especially Fox News Channel.

    Turnabout is fair play, and now people on the left grumble incessantly that Fox fails to live up to its "fair and balanced" slogan. They insist it actually slants right. That's undoubtedly true of its commentary programs, such as "Hannity" and "The O'Reilly Factor," but news shows like "Special Report With Bret Baier" are at least as down-the-middle as anyone else's.

    But for the likes of Krugman, Melber and Rosen, down-the-middle journalism is the problem. They want the press corps to accept their own political doctrines as the truth and to treat anyone who departs from them as, in Krugman's words, "insane."

    To some extent, they already do that. Writing for Reason.com, Barton Hinkle contrasts mainstream media coverage of congressmen on the two political extremes:

    The late Sen. Paul Wellstone of Minnesota was a man of the hard left. . . . Wellstone died in a plane crash in 2002, and was immediate [sic] lionized. The Washington Post called him one of the Senate's "leading liberals. . . . Colleagues from across the political spectrum praised Wellstone as a passionate advocate for his beliefs." He was "a hero to the left," the paper said, noting "there was little doubt where his heart lay." To The New York Times, Wellstone was "a rumpled, unfailingly modest man," a "firebrand," and although "his opponents always portrayed him as a left-wing extremist," Wellstone was "so happy, so comfortable, so unthreatening that he was able to ward off the attacks." Rumor has it he once fed a crowd with five loaves of bread and a couple of fish.

    This is not, to put it mildly, how Tea Partiers and their congressional cohort have been portrayed during the recent game of chicken over the debt ceiling. Rather, those opposed to raising the debt ceiling--or willing to do so in exchange for a slowdown in the rate of government growth--are "obstreperous," "flatly and dangerously wrong," and "not interested in governing." (These are all quotes from major media organs, not obscure blogs.) They're "crazy" proponents of a "dangerous delusion"--"ridiculous," "extremist," "ultraorthodox tax haters," players of "ideological games," "totally unrealistic," authors of "madness," etc. etc.

    Hey, what happened to people of conviction? Aren't the Tea Partiers "firebrands"? Isn't there little doubt where their hearts lie?

    Indeed, here's Paul Krugman eulogizing Paul Wellstone in October 2002:

    Paul Wellstone took risks. He was, everyone acknowledges, a politician who truly voted his convictions, who supported what he thought was right, not what he thought would help him get re-elected. He took risky stands on many issues: agree or disagree, you have to admit that his vote against authorization for an Iraq war was a singularly brave act.

    Can't the same be said of, say, Rep. Michele Bachmann and her determination to vote against increasing the debt limit (a position with which, we suppose we should note, this column disagrees)? Instead, in January Krugman lied and accused her of using "eliminationist rhetoric."

    The Bachmann-Wellstone comparison is apt, for she, like him, is ideologically at the far end of her party. She was one of only nine House Republicans to vote against the Cut, Cap and Balance Act, because it included a debt-ceiling hike. This is not a big enough bloc to hold the balance of power in the current Congress.

    When Krugman and like-minded lefties refer to the "insane" Tea Party Republicans, they have in mind a larger group: a group big enough, and sufficiently willing to compromise, that they can push the ultimate resolution of the current standoff in a rightward direction. They wish that the media not only would take sides but had the power, by taking sides, to win this for Obama and the Democrats.

    That was the outcome when the last Democratic president engaged in similar brinksmanship with a Republican Congress, in 1995 and 1996. Many things were different in those days, but one was a far more uniform media environment. Rush Limbaugh was around, but not Fox News or the blogosphere. In those days you didn't hear lefties complain that the mainstream media were too balanced. Yet if anything, they have become more unbalanced. (Krugman, for example, had not yet been hired by the New York Times.)

    Suppose that tomorrow CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, the Associated Press and the news sections of the Times and the Washington Post all changed their journalism so that their reporting was as unbalanced as Krugman's columns. Would that win the day for Obama? We very much doubt it. Rather, it would drive the size of their reader- and viewership toward the levels of The Nation and MSNBC, which are not exactly powerhouses of influence.

    What the self-styled opponents of balance really want is something resembling a state media monopoly--but one that is nominally independent and that is pliant when liberals run the government and adversarial when conservatives do. That is more or less what existed between the 1970s and the late '90s, when competition greatly weakened the authority of the formerly mainstream media. Strident leftism is not going to restore that authority.

====================================

From” pwonk

    Sent: Saturday, July 30, 2011 2:49 PM

   

    Subject: Excellent Krugman Column

    Paul Krugman puts his finger on the critical failure of today's media and one that I have long decried - the Centrist Falacy" in which the media report both sides of an issue as if they are equally credible.  The reporting on the current deficit insanity has done this over and over and it is driving me crazy.  News outlets consistently report that Obama and the Republicans are unable to reach a compromise, leaving the impression that both are equally at fault which is complete and utter nonsense.

    All it would take would be a few knuckle-headed scientists to create a foundation dedicated to the proposition that the earth is flat and today's media would report the knuckle-heads' position along with statements from the National Academy of Science as if both were equally credible.  The headline would be "Experts Deadlocked on Shape of Earth"

    ARRRGGGGHHH!!!

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