It’s morning at the NY Times: the budget crisis “is all obfuscating nonsense”

Morning in NYC, photo public domain

A surprising editorial in the NY Times appears this morning titled “The Hollow Cry of Broke,” which suggests that John Boehner, Scott Walker, and company are exaggerating the nation’s so-called financial crisis in order “to break unions and kill programs they never liked in the first place.”

Keep in mind that in recent weeks, NY Times op-ed writers have railed time and again at those “entitlements” as the source of the nation’s scary budget deficit and more specifically, said pundits have blamed Social Security, a self-funding program, and Medicare for our current economic woes.

I’ve yet to see David Brooks or any of his colleagues at the Times mention that the government has violated federal law in raiding the Social Security Trust fund to pay for its two wars of choice and avoid taxing the wealthy or closing tax loopholes for major corporations. And they’ve certainly not mentioned that the nation’s seniors paid into the Social Security Trust Fund throughout their working lives with high payroll taxes.

So what’s with this Times editorial that begins:

“We’re broke! We’re broke!” Speaker John Boehner said on Sunday. “We’re broke in this state,” Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin said a few days ago. “New Jersey’s broke,” Gov. Chris Christie has said repeatedly. The United States faces a “looming bankruptcy,” Charles Koch, the billionaire industrialist, wrote in The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday.

It’s all obfuscating nonsense, of course, a scare tactic employed for political ends. A country with a deficit is not necessarily any more “broke” than a family with a mortgage or a college loan. And states have to balance their budgets. Though it may disappoint many conservatives, there will be no federal or state bankruptcies. 

The federal deficit is too large for comfort, and most states are struggling to balance their books. Some of that is because of excessive spending, and much is because the recession has driven down tax revenues. But a substantial part was caused by deliberate decisions by state and federal lawmakers to drain government of resources by handing out huge tax cuts, mostly to the rich. As governments begin to stagger from the self-induced hemorrhaging, Republican politicians like Mr. Boehner and Mr. Walker cry poverty and use it as an excuse to break unions and kill programs they never liked in flush years.

Those programs "they never liked in flush years" included Social Security and Medicare. Anyway, it’s good to see the Times editorial board is waking up. I’m resisting the temptation to say, “Good morning, fellas.”

Read the rest of this on target editorial here.