NYT Still Won't Report Obama's Reform Agenda Would Cut Deficit

While there is a constant drumbeat in the media about how President Obama's big spending agenda is turning off the electorate, the media generally fails to report that the signature items of his reform agenda -- health care, clean energy and financial reform -- have all been scored by the Congressional Budget Office as reducing the deficit.

Back in February I chided the New York Times for baselessly asserting that President Obama literally could not even attempt to enact "new domestic initiatives" because of the deficit, ignoring that all of this then-pending domestic initiatives would cut the deficit.

Since then, the health care law just enacted was estimated as one of the biggest pieces of deficit reduction legislation in history: more than a $1 trillion of savings over the next two decades.

Yet this reality still escapes the NYT.

On Sunday, the paper quoted former Republican congressman Bob Walker, unchallenged, on how the deficit was hurting the President politically: "For independents, the real issues are the debt and deficit. And some of the programs he’s putting forward are exacerbating the problem."

Walker was not pressed to say what those exacerbating programs are, and the NYT did not list any. It is just generally assumed that much of what Obama wants to do would cost us all money and grow the deficit.

Walker's quote on its own is not quite a lie. Certainly, the perception that the President is recklessly growing the deficit is a drag on his support among some independent voters.

But that is because the media rarely explains how the President's proposal can invest public dollars and reduce costs over time. Some the President's fellow Democrats are no help -- several right-leaning Dems fretted about the cost of health care reform even after the CBO deemed it a deficit cutter. And conservative congresspeople have routinely ignored the CBO whenever it finds the President's programs would save money.

Further, Walker is technically correct that "some" of the President's proposals have increased the short-term deficit, most notably the Recovery Act. But the economic stimulus passed with the clear support of the public, including independents, because in the midst of economic crisis, actual economists were able to be heard saying an increase in the deficit was what the doctor ordered to avert another Great Depression.

Public support of the Recovery Act has weakened since, because the slow pace of recovery has led the media to largely ignore the calls of economists saying while the stimulus did succeed in averting a depression, it didn't invest enough and increase the budget deficit enough in the short-run to spark a robust recovery.

Perhaps if media outlets like the NYT actually explained a how larger deficit can mean a shorter recession, and how the pillars of the President long-term reform agenda in regards to health care, clean energy and financial reform would cut the deficit, the perceptions of independent voters would be quite different.

But that would mean fact-checking and providing context to the quotes of the conservatives the paper prints.

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