WAY BACK, I said Chronicle editorialists did two good things over the Christmas holidays. The first was to write a respectful editorial -- the first in a long while -- about Christmas. The other . . .
. . . was was to admit the federal budget deficit and national debt were, you know, problems.
[Doing nothing] is looking more and more like a plunge into the abyss -- a greatly weakened America in an ever more dangerous world.
Nobody, Democrat or Republican, wants that. Let's resolve to do something about the budget deficit and the national debt without delay.
(Editorial, "We owe, we owe," Houston Chronicle, January 7, 2010)
The first step to overcoming addiction is to admit the problem. In that sense, the editorial represents progress.
To write such an editorial, however, is perfect evidence that the Chronicle lacks self-awareness and, therefore, is immune to cognitive dissonance -- "the uncomfortable feeling caused by holding two contradictory ideas simultaneously."
The contradictory idea, of course, is that the Chronicle has supported and still supports every spending proposal by the Obama administration -- the cumulative effect of which has been to create the abyss the Chronicle bemoans.
"Half-measures won't do in putting the nation back on course," the editors thundered back in April. "Boldness and vision are required. Obama is demonstrating both. We encourage the president to stay his course." That course, as the editorial made clear, was more spending on education, energy and the environment, and health care, and more economic regulation.
And this graph, remember, is before tax-and-cap and Obamacare, both of which the Chronicle also supports.
(Here is Unca D's brilliant takedown of the April editorial.)
Another problem with the Chronicle's new-found concern for deficits and debt is timidity. The last paragraph doesn't call for a specific remedy. It doesn't even call for doing anything. It calls for resolving to do something.
Advice to the Chronicle: The only way to stop spending too much money is to stop spending too much money. The only way to reduce the debt is to start spending less.
How hard was that?
What today's Wall Street Journal says about President Obama's sudden interest in fiscal responsibility could apply equally to the Chronicle.
The tragedy is that Mr. Obama's fiscal conversion comes a year too late, assuming it is now real. If the President and his party really are serious, they can do more than promise a spending freeze after 2012. They can stop spending more now: Drop the health-care bill, cancel the unspent stimulus spending from last year, kill the $150 billion new stimulus that has already passed the House, and bar all repaid bailout cash from being re-spent. Everything else is marketing.
(Editorial, "The Obama fisc," Wall Street Journal, January 27, 2010)
* * *
Here's an oldie-but-good from George Will that goes a long way toward explaining why deficits are so persistent:
Beneath Americans' perfunctory disapproval of government deficits lurks an inconvenient truth: They enjoy deficits, by which they are charged less than a dollar for a dollar's worth of government.
(George F. Will, "A Vote Against Rashness," Washington Post, October 1, 2008)
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