Al Hunt's Boys Still Good for a Laugh After All This Time
Al Hunt's minions aren't missing a beat as the new Republican majority takes the helm in the House of Representatives. Apparently these putative deficit hawks got right on easing those critical anti-deficit rules, known as "pay-go" in order to grease the skids for tax cuts. Reporter Brian Faler comes at this subject with the expository acumen of a sixteen year old. Just read the almost never-ending series banal lefty tropes. It reads like a game of word association played over beers in some Columbia students' lounge. Corporations! Tax cuts! Government shortfall! Democrats close loopholes! George W. Bush!
Beyond the adolescent tone and structure the key offense of this exercise in "journalism" is a stunning level of political unsophistication. Faler has bought the paygo scam hook, line and sinker. Paygo was, by admission, not an anti-deficit mechanism. It was design to make tax cuts hard and spending easy. The rules were routinely waived or just outright ignored. In an even more stunning display of political ignorance, Faler perpetuates the laughable and now officially repudiated claim that ObamaCare cuts the budget deficit. No one believed that from the get go and the CBO's original projections were for big deficits. The CBO then said that their ultimate analysis was phony because of the way Congress gamed the process (like by sticking in an equally phony student loan bill). Finally, CBO revised their view after the fact and now say that the healthcare bill won't save any money but will cost...well...alot (which any reasonable person would have expected). Nevertheless Faler, presumably with a straight face, tells us that those profligate Republicans are intent on denying the nation this critical money-saving program (which, btw, has it's fiscal linchpin - the individual mandate - hanging by a thread under judicial scrutiny).
Just a note, I am now in my sixth year of chronicling the biased inanity of Al Hunt & Co. over at Bloomberg News. Keep it up Al, I'd miss ya' if you didn't.
UPDATE: Here is my favorite stroll down Memory Lane with Al.
Beyond the adolescent tone and structure the key offense of this exercise in "journalism" is a stunning level of political unsophistication. Faler has bought the paygo scam hook, line and sinker. Paygo was, by admission, not an anti-deficit mechanism. It was design to make tax cuts hard and spending easy. The rules were routinely waived or just outright ignored. In an even more stunning display of political ignorance, Faler perpetuates the laughable and now officially repudiated claim that ObamaCare cuts the budget deficit. No one believed that from the get go and the CBO's original projections were for big deficits. The CBO then said that their ultimate analysis was phony because of the way Congress gamed the process (like by sticking in an equally phony student loan bill). Finally, CBO revised their view after the fact and now say that the healthcare bill won't save any money but will cost...well...alot (which any reasonable person would have expected). Nevertheless Faler, presumably with a straight face, tells us that those profligate Republicans are intent on denying the nation this critical money-saving program (which, btw, has it's fiscal linchpin - the individual mandate - hanging by a thread under judicial scrutiny).
Just a note, I am now in my sixth year of chronicling the biased inanity of Al Hunt & Co. over at Bloomberg News. Keep it up Al, I'd miss ya' if you didn't.
UPDATE: Here is my favorite stroll down Memory Lane with Al.
posted by Donny Baseball at 4:26 PM
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