The Media Honeymoon Ends

The Washington Post is probably best editorially characterized as center-left. More often than not, the Post backs Democratic Party candidates and Democratic Party causes. It is telling, then, that the Post’s editorial board today called for President Barack Obama (D) and the Democratic leadership in Congress to drop its universal health care plans and focus instead on fixing the federal budget.

Why? The newly revised deficit estimates from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), coming in-line with independent estimates from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and other analysts, have skyrocketed to an estimated $9 trillion over the next decade. Like many Americans, the Post editorial board has tired of Obama’s continued claims that he ‘inherited’ massive deficits from President George W. Bush (R). While the statement is true on its face, the fact is that the Obama administration has continued and accelerated Bush’s reckless end-of-term spending. It is time for Obama to stop pointing fingers and start proposing solutions.

As the Post aptly puts it:

Still, the Bush administration’s irresponsibility notwithstanding, it is time to stop crying “we inherited it.” The Obama administration needs its own clear, credible plan for restoring fiscal sustainability once the worst of the recession has run its course. Unless it can at least limit the growth in debt to the growth of the economy, investors will gradually lose faith in Treasury obligations, increasing the government’s borrowing costs—and turning a deficit crunch into a deficit spiral. In the worst case, unchecked debt could trigger a return to the double-digit inflation and interest rates of the late 1970s, only this time with massive U.S. obligations to foreign lenders such as China and Japan.

It’s nice to see even ‘liberal’ media outlets starting to awaken to the realities around us. The reckless bailout insanity initiated in the waning days of the Bush administration, then continued under Obama, is lining us up for economic collapse, not recovery. The last thing we need to be talking about now is huge new federal spending programs (which are a questionable idea even in the best of times).