You may have caught an erroneous news report this morning, first reported by CNN, that a U.S. Coast Guard vessel had fired upon a threatening vessel in the Potomac River in Washington, DC. According to these initial reports, the skirmish happened around the time that President Barack Obama (D) was very close by at the Pentagon. As a result of the ‘incident’ departures were halted at nearby Reagan National Airport for twenty minutes.

The problem? There was no incident, there were no shots fired, and nothing newsworthy was happening.

Indeed, there were Coast Guard vessels on the Potomac . . . engaged in a regular, low-profile training exercise. As part of the exercise, Coast Guardsmen were communicating on a radio training frequency. Apparently somebody monitoring this frequency heard the exercise chatter—including a report of shots fired (complete with Coast Guardsmen saying, “bang, bang” to represent gun fire . . . no kidding). Apparently the folks at CNN couldn’t be bothered to ask, say, the Coast Guard was happening before reporting about this supposed incident on the river, and a media frenzy ensued.

Reporting a minor training exercise as a possible terrorist attack without any verification whatsover is, plain and simple, bad journalism.

It’s basic common sense. When you are low on cash, you don’t spend . . . you save. According to Keynesian economists, however, the way a government should handle a recession or depression is to start spending. The theory goes that government spending puts people to work, which gives them income, which gets spent, and the economic cycle gets moving again.

The problem is that Keynesian economics is as crazy as it sounds. On its face there’s a kind of a logic, but if you have even a simplistic understanding of how money works you know that it just doesn’t seem right. The reason is that the government, in order to pay for these initiatives, has to find money somewhere. It can just print it out of thin air, which leads to inflation and reduces the value of the money and further destabilizes the economy. It can also run up huge debts, which is better than fabricating money out of thin air but still leads to all kinds of long term problems. The debts have to be paid sooner or later.

Keynesian economics is a discredited theory, at least among economists who aren’t blinded by their own personal politics. It doesn’t work. It was attempted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt (D) during the Great Depression and, despite the over-simplified story they tell us in grade school, those efforts prolonged and deepened the economic calamity we found ourselves in. It most certainly didn’t help things, and we’re still paying the debts we ran up with all of FDR’s ‘New Deal’ programs 70 years later.

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