I generally like the Wall Street Journal immensely. As an American daily business newspaper, it has no peer. It's editorial page, while tilting right, is fair and fact-based.
With Al Hunt's departure some years ago, the editorial page lost its last shred of liberal-leaning nuttiness. Not so the news pages, though.
To demonstrate this, let's consider the recent article, entitled "Legacy of Deficits Will Constrain Bush's Successor," from Friday's Journal, written by Michael Phillips and John McKinnon. It's a textbook case in how the use of suggestive, biased adjectives, selective data and judiciously dressed-up contradictory facts can be used to lead a reader to a totally erroneous conclusion.
To begin with, you need to remember something that occurred in my own youth. It's the impoundment issue. A Time magazine article of the era, found here, nicely summarizes the issue,
"Faced with what he considered a profligate Congress, Richard Nixon transformed an occasional practice of former Presidents into a tactic of confrontation. Claiming he had a presidential right of impoundment, Nixon simply refused to spend at least $16 billion appropriated by Congress for a variety of projects. In 1973 the Supreme Court, aware that it might soon face more serious tests of presidential power, ducked the issue. Last week, with those problems behind them, the Justices turned to an impoundment-related suit and by a 9-to-0 vote delivered one more resounding no to the Nixon doctrine of Executive power.
The case involved Nixon's decision to spend no more than $5 billion of the $11 billion that Congress had appropriated, over his veto, for water-pollution control. Although the court stuck strictly to the language of the pollution law and avoided any sorting of federal powers, Justice Byron White's opinion bluntly agreed with the plaintiff, New York City, that "the act does not permit such action" by any President.
That should just about end the confrontation; Congress last year passed a law eliminating any future Nixon-style impoundment. Under the new law, the President must get the approval of a majority of Congress if he wishes to withhold any authorized funds. He may delay the spending—but only if he tells Congress, and if a majority of either House does not vote against the delay."
This is important, because it plants the stake in the ground at 1973-74 for the last time a President was truly responsible for Federal spending. And I mean either party. For the last 35 years, Congress has been the budget-busting branch of the US Government, not the Executive.
So, on to the Journal article.
The authors begin with these paragraphs, which read like they were meant for a similar article in the People's Daily, a/k/a The New York Times,
"George W. Bush took office in 2001 with budget surpluses projected to stretch years into the future. But it's almost certain that when he returns to Texas next year, the president will leave behind a trail of deficits and debt that will sharply constrain his successor.
On Monday, the president will unveil a $3 trillion-plus budget request for his final year, which is likely to show a deficit of more than $400 billion. New details of the budget emerged yesterday, with officials saying the White House plans to keep a lid on nonsecurity discretionary spending. It wants to cut about $200 billion from the government's medical programs for seniors and the poor."
Read on its own, the passages has you forgetting we're in a shooting war in two countries, and the overall Federal deficit has, in fact, been shrinking under President Bush. Because the authors use 'projected' budget surpluses, they easily suggest Bush has been profligate.
Next, the authors write,
"The longer-term picture is darker. Despite his efforts, Mr. Bush failed to work out a deal with Congress to tackle the spiraling costs of government health and retirement programs."
See how perspective poisons the message? The same reality could have been written thusly,
"The longer term picture is darker. Despite their efforts, members of Congress failed to work out a deal with President Bush to tackle the spiraling costs of government health and retirement programs,"
implying, correctly, that Congress, with the power of the purse, chose to ignore the looming fiscal debacle. Instead, by cleverly transposing terms, Phillips and McKinnon place blame on Bush, who has no budgetary authority.
With me so far? Good. Let's move further into this attack piece on Bush. The next passage I'll cite reads,
"The president's critics say his failings are twofold: He has squandered surpluses that could have helped pay down the $5 trillion federal debt. And he has let two terms pass without persuading Congress to take action that would preserve the government's social programs."
But how can a President, without the power of impoundment, squander anything? And, once again, the authors phrase the Federal impasse on spending programs as if it's purely Bush's fault, because he didn't persuade Congress. Congress writes the laws. Isn't it Congress' job to persuade the President to sign their bills?
Then the article's authors surprise us with this candid bit of Bush defense,
"Mr. Bush's defenders say he did the best he could in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, and that he has recently tightened up on spending. The budget deficit in fiscal 2004 measured 3.6% of gross domestic product; last year it narrowed to 1.2% of GDP, low by historical standards. The deficit is expected to rise to 2.5% of GDP, or about $350 billion, this fiscal year, assuming Congress passes an expected economic-stimulus package.
"You could say, 'Gee, he inherited surpluses and now we have a deficit,'" said Rob Portman, the former head of the White House budget office under Mr. Bush. "On the other hand, you could say he inherited a recession" in 2001. Mr. Portman called the country's fiscal health "relatively strong" and said the president has left a solid base for "the next president and the next Congress to deal with the real problem, which is the unsustainable growth in mandatory spending." "
Enjoy it. Savor it. 'Cause it's all you're going to get. Next, they state,
"When Mr. Bush took the oath of office in 2001, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projected $5.6 trillion in federal budget surpluses through 2011. Through most of his tenure, the president managed to have his guns, butter and tax cuts without creating enormous budget deficits, at least as measured by their share of GDP. One reason was a surprise increase in federal tax receipts from corporations over the last couple of years. Now those revenues have flattened out and the economy is teetering on the edge of recession."
First, it's laughable to call the CBO nonpartisan. It's been left-leaning for as long as I've been old enough to vote. Even under Reagan, conservatives chafed that he wouldn't cashier the head of it, in order to force the introduction of 'dynamic scoring.' The CBO, in case you don't know, continues to use 'static scoring' to 'evaluate' the effects of various taxation and spending proposals on the Federal budget and deficit. By refusing to use dynamic scoring on tax proposals, the CBO indicates that it believes that changes in taxation policy has no effect on how people behave economically.
This is preposterous. The effects of the Reagan-era tax cuts, and Bush's more recent ones, solidly demonstrate that people do react to lower tax rates, earning more, creating more value and, consequentially, more tax revenue for the Federal Treasury.
That, by the way, is the source of the 'surprise increase in Federal tax receipts' of which Messrs. Phillips and McKinnon blithely write. So if the increase was a "surprise," doesn't that suggest the CBO doesn't do its job very well? And perhaps mandates for dynamic scoring?
"Mr. Bush and Congress, meanwhile, increased federal spending by 25% between 2001 and 2007, adjusted for inflation, according to Brian Riedl of the conservative Heritage Foundation. By Sept. 30, the U.S. will have spent almost $800 billion on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. A new Medicare prescription-drug benefit for seniors costs almost $80 billion a year. Mr. Bush's signature tax cuts, in 2001 and 2003, sapped tax receipts and sliced the projected budget surplus by about $1.7 trillion through 2011, according to the CBO."
This passage, as prior ones, again features inaccurate and biasing wordsmithing. Congress, not "Mr. Bush and Congress," increased federal spending. Remember impoundment?
Then the authors turn to fixing Social Security. Here's how they tar Bush on this issue. An issue, by the way, that only President Bush, among our recent Federal leaders, has had the courage to raise and for which he's offered a solution,
"Mr. Bush came into office in 2001 vowing to save Social Security from financial ruin. "My opponent completely ignores the long-term problems of Social Security," he said of Democratic nominee Al Gore during a New Mexico campaign stop in the waning days of the 2000 campaign. Eventually, the retirement bills for baby boomers would come due, he warned. "And our children and grandchildren will pay them with massive new taxes."
In 2005, Mr. Bush tried to tackle Social Security, on the theory that it should be easier to fix than Medicare. The latter is more expensive, and salvaging it would require the government to find a way to stem rising medical costs.
Mr. Bush approached the subject from a free-market point of view, calling on Congress to divert some of the Social Security payroll tax into individual investment accounts. Many Democrats and seniors saw it as an attempt to kill the program rather than fix it.
"The president put a proposal on the table, and I think he gets credit for that," says Alice Rivlin, President Clinton's budget director and a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve. "But he wasn't willing to negotiate with the Congress to make it a serious proposal that both sides could accept. And Congress wasn't ready to negotiate." "
This is rich! The authors quote Alice Rivlin, a decidedly liberal politico and demagogue, Clinton appointee, as the source by which to find Bush guilty of not being 'willing to negotiate with the Congress to make it a serious proposal that both sides would accept.'
Again, they could have written, just as validly,
"But Congress wasn't willing to negotiate with the President to make it a serious proposal that both sides could accept. And Bush wasn't ready to negotiate."
Then we have this baldfaced assertion,
"Last year, Mr. Bush asked Congress to slow the rate of growth of Medicare spending, aiming to cut $8 trillion from the program's $34 trillion unfunded obligations over the next 75 years. But the president couldn't win congressional support."
Which is roughly equivalent to having written this, instead,
"Last year, Mr. Bush asked Congress to slow the rate of growth of Medicare spending, aiming to cut $8 trillion from the program's $34 trillion unfunded obligations over the next 75 years.
But Congress, always spending like a drunken sailor, refused to see the common sense of this proposal. Thus, with Congress' spending making drunken sailors look prudent by comparison, and the legislative branch's refusal to even consider trimming this profilgate spending, the president couldn't win congressional support."
The rest of the article deals with the alleged fiscal straitjacket which the authors contend President Bush will hand his successor.
I don't think so.
All you have to do is refresh your memory, or, if too young for that, learn about the 1970s impoundment issue, to see where the truth in this whole affair lies. It's Congress' 'legacy of deficits,' not any President's.
Blame both parties, in proportion to the years they led and corresponding runup in the country's deficit. Except, note that, with Bush in office, the Republican-controlled Congress did something Democrats rarely did in their years in power in Congress from the New Deal until the Gingrich era- shrink the Federal deficit.
It's pretty sad when the Wall Street Journal's staff writers, in this case, Messrs. Phillips and McKinnon, can't get basic facts straight. Facts I confirmed via Google in about 3 minutes.
How do we get such liberal, left-biased writing as 'news' in the Wall Street Journal? Will Rupert be fixing this?
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