Unskilled Labor: "
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I used to write editorials for the Wall Street Journal... So I’m well aware of the challenge faced by those assigned to compose these documents. The strict demands of the paper’s ideology do not always lie smoothly over the rocky outcroppings of reality. It can take considerable skill to match the two together.
Unfortunately, many of the writers aren't that skilled.
He goes on:
In that regard, this morning’s lead editorial about the debt-ceiling crisis is a true masterpiece.
If you were to write a story about government debt, you’d probably be inclined to write about the two sets of government decisions that produce deficits or surpluses: decisions about expenditure and decisions about revenue. You’d want to do that not only as a matter of fairness, but also as a matter of math.
And that’s why, my friend, you would wash out as a WSJ editorialist. They wrote this editorial without any reference to revenues whatsoever. Boom! Gone! Don’t deny reality. Defy reality. ...
One of the many traps and impediments facing a Journal editorialist writing about debt is that up until 2009, the US debt burden rose most under the two presidents the Journal most ardently supported: Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. The debt burden declined most under the presidents the Journal most despises – Dwight Eisenhower, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter.
It must have taken some hunting, but the Journal managed to find a chart that did just the opposite: federal payments to individuals as a percentage of federal outlays. What’s so great about this chart is that it excludes two of three biggest federal spending programs: Medicare and Medicaid, both of whose costs rose faster in the Bush 2000s than in the Clinton 1990s. ...
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