BCT Editorial – 3/1/09

This page was last updated on October 20, 2009.

Move it along; Editorial; Beaver County Times; March 1, 2009.

The editorial subtitle is “When it comes to Obama’s budget, doing something is better than doing nothing.”

When it comes to taking positions, the Times editorial authors appear to have the split personality characteristics of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or Two-Face.

For at least the last four years preceding the 2008 election, and likely from the first day of the Bush administration, Times editorials constantly and correctly complained about federal deficit spending, the country’s growing debt, and the burden that debt puts on us and future generations. Referring to these complaints as crocodile tears, I questioned the motives in my critiques because Times editorials concurrently lobbied for more spending on just about every proposal that came down the pike. As I’ve noted previously, since we elected President Obama, Times editorials now support deficit spending. Five previous examples are “Last resort,” “Limited options,” “Budget crunch,” “Making the grade,” and “Failing grade.”

The whiplash is getting worse now that the Times both decries and supports deficit spending in the same editorials.

The editorial leads off with “The United States is in the midst of an economic crisis that hasn’t been seen since the Great Depression.” This is both fear mongering and lying. Let’s remember this is the same paper that during the Bush administration said it was fear mongering to remind us terrorists were a threat. I don’t like to accuse people of lying because I don’t usually know what they know. In this case, however, it’s too hard to belief the editorial author doesn’t know the facts don’t support his position. Are we to believe the author doesn’t know about the stagflation (double-digit interest/mortgage rates, double-digit unemployment, and near double-digit inflation) of the late-1970s/early-1980s and the gasoline lines? I thought I was lucky when I got a 16% mortgage! If the facts supported the Times position, the editorial would have laid them out.

The editorial concludes with “The best way to approach the Obama budget is that doing something is better than doing nothing. Desperate times require drastic measures.” This is the whole purpose of the editorial’s fear mongering and lying. It’s to scare us into doing things in haste without thinking them through using facts, history, and logic to guide us. That’s what happened in the 1930s and it turned what should have been a “typical” recession into the Great Depression.