The Irresponsible Hackery of Ezra Klein

Ezra Klein, the Washington Post’s resident progressive talking point parrot and regurgitator of Soros-funded think tank analyses, has delivered, once again, a pathetic piece of hackery that cannot go unaddressed. The wunderkind was tasked by his handlers to smear a proposal being put forward by Democrat Claire McCaskill and Republican Bob Corker.

Now, I haven’t looked at this McCaskill-Corker proposal but I can tell you Ezra Klein is pushing some major nonsense in his attack of it.

There’s talk that the McCaskill-Corker spending cap will be the cost of raising the debt ceiling. This would be, to put it simply, completely insane. Spending caps are bad policy, and the McCaskill-Corker spending cap — which holds spending to 21.5 percent of GDP, or three percentage points lower than it is right now — is a badly designed spending cap. But beyond all that, it’s laughable to posit it as a compromise: It’s arguably the most radically conservative reform that could be made to the federal budget. More extreme, by far, than Paul Ryan’s plan.

Clearly, Klein’s not a fan. He sets it up by pretending that everyone agrees that spending caps are bad policy. He then pretends that 21.5% of GDP is some crazy low number ignoring that the federal government has never been able to generate more than about 20% of GDP (the last time in 2000) in tax revenue. So in Ezra’s world, we are supposed to run a deficit permanently. Or he simply has no clue what he’s talking about. And it gets worse.

Start with the shell game at the core of this discussion: We’re worried about the debt ceiling but talking about a spending cap. This works just fine if you hew to the conservative conceit that “we have a spending problem, not a taxing problem.” But that applause line is just an effort to deny the contribution tax cuts have made to the deficit and keep tax increases from being part of a solution. If you think we have a debt problem — and that’s what being upset about raising the debt ceiling implies — then do something about the debt.

The “conservative conceit.” As Kevin Eder showed here, there’s no way to increase taxes (presumably on the rich since Klein doesn’t believe in taxing anyone else) would generate enough revenue to 1) balance the budget and 2) pay off the debt (which would require running a surplus). It’s not a “conceit” to recognize simple math. Maybe Klein has a problem with simple arithmetic because it’s more than 100 years old.

While Klein proves math is hard, he lets slip what his real issue is with spending caps. Quoting the president of the Soros Open Society Institute funded Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Klein writes this:

Of course, to the Republicans, that’s a feature, not a bug. The virtue of a spending cap is that by focusing on only one contributor to debt, it admits only one solution to it: spending cuts. Savage ones. The Corker-McCaskill proposal is so aggressive that there are years when even Paul Ryan’s budget, with all its fantastical assumptions and hard caps, wouldn’t qualify. “You put McCaskill-Corker into law,” says Bob Greenstein, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “and progressive policy is dead for the next quarter-century.”

And that, my friends, is the problem. Spending caps, budget cuts, etc. threaten progressive policy. Period. That’s all the golden boy cares about. As long as progressivism is advanced, Ezra doesn’t care if we run deficits in perpetuity. As if money grows on trees. The thirst to keep the Statist agenda moving forward leads Klein to make a seriously irresponsible statement. See if you can catch it:

Saying “America has a spending problem” is saying “I don’t understand the budget and don’t want to learn anything further about it.” We have a health-care costs problem, an aging problem and a taxing problem. But a spending cap has nothing to say about any of these problems. Health-care costs are rising far in excess of GDP growth, and a spending cap does nothing to stop them. Seniors will go from 13 percent of the population now to 20 percent of the population in 2035, which means America will temporarily have fewer people working and more people dependent on government support. But the spending cap does nothing to reverse the aging process.

Do you see it? Here’s a chart that might help. It’s the age distribution in the year 2000.

That bulge in the middle of the chart are the baby boomers which Klein is talking about. Do you see Klein’s ridiculous assumption yet? Klein asserts that there will only be a “temporary” period where more people will be collecting benefits than are working to pay for those benefits. It doesn’t take a complicated mathematical formula to understand that it is a moronic assumption. Just look at the chart. The “temporary” period is around forty years. He makes it sound like it’s just a few years in an effort to minimize the long term problem we’re going to be facing in the not-too-distant future.

When you combine the fact that Klein is whining about capping spending, at a level that would still be higher than has ever been covered by tax revenue, with his playing fast and loose with the impact of the baby boomer generation, you can only conclude that the “genius” is even more unserious than the administration whose water he is carrying.

These are the Left’s thought leaders. These are the narrative shapers. Ignorant hacks whose “analysis” becomes conventional wisdom repeated in the mainstream press and keeps the populace grossly misinformed.

God help us.