Insta-Hack Watch

He's up to his partisan shenanigans again. He must know that the huge deficits projected in the future have virtually nothing to do with Obama's proposals on healthcare or energy. They are a function of inherited entitlement spending, the legacy of two open-ended wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the revenue lost from the current depression (and the last). All of this was inherited by Obama as Leonhardt decisively showed. So Reynolds publishes yet again the CBO graph, insinuating it represents future discretionary spending by Obama when of course it lays out future deficits under the burden of empire, depression and entitlements. Reynolds' solution? Stop the stimulus spending and TARP. To which one can only utter "oookaaay."

The only "covering" for Obama's spending is the spending now in the middle of a steep, steep global depression whose future is yet unknown. No one is covering for the future Bush-inherited Obama-planned debt. In fact some of us are offering actual proposals for serious structural spending cuts.

Today, David Brooks has a fine column that makes many of the same points. And all Reynolds can talk about is pork and the stimulus! In fact, that's all he ever talked about. In this post bragging that he actually took on the GOP for their "big-spending ways", he cites two posts about pork. That is simply not serious; and never was. It was credentializing to cover for his own support for the most fiscally reckless administration in recent history. If you want to find an intellectually honest fiscal conservative who didn't shill for Bush for eight long years, read Bruce Bartlett, who is now honest enough to envisage a VAT. Or this blog, from 2001 onwards. I have some cred on this issue that extends beyond silly posturing about pork.