Over the past weekend, there was actually some news made on the Sunday morning talk shows for a change. Two leading Republicans—House Speaker John Boehner and Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the House Budget Committee chairman—declared that the federal government does not, at the moment, face a debt crisis.
“We do not have an immediate debt crisis, but we all know that we have one looming,” Boehner said on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos.
Ryan, appearing on CBS’s Face The Nation, spoke almost identical words: “We do not have a debt crisis right now, but we see it coming.”
The “no immediate crisis” line echoes something President Obama had said just a week earlier. But as those quotes show, the Republican position continues to be that a debt reckoning lies just over the horizon. And the GOP is not adjusting its favored budget policies—most recently laid out in the latest Ryan budget, which also speaks of a crisis that is about to hit, but hasn’t yet. So this bit of coordinated messaging does not represent a full about-face.
Still, given the way the budget wars dominate national politics—and the way different assumptions and frames dominate discussion of the budget—the statements by Boehner and Ryan were news in themselves, not to mention occasions for further reporting.
If you rely on a newspaper for your news, though, you might not have heard their comments. As of Tuesday, the statements had not made into The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, The Dallas Morning News, The Denver Post, Detroit Free Press, The Kansas City Star, The Miami Herald, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, or The Seattle Times, among many other newspapers, a check of the paper’s websites, Google, and the Nexis “all news” file showed.
So where did they get written up? Sean Sullivan, writing for The Washington Post’s “The Fix” blog, delivered an account of the remarks. (The item did not appear in the print version of the Post, which consistently shortchanges readers who pay for home delivery compared to those who read the publication’s broader online offerings.)
The Chicago Tribune buried on Page C12 an underwhelming 77-word Reuters account:
Leading congressional Republicans said Sunday a broad deal with President Barack Obama on deficit reduction and entitlement reform remains possible but differed over potential flexibility on taxes, with the House speaker and budget leader not bending.
House Speaker John Boehner and Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan agreed with Obama’s assessment that the U.S. was not currently in a debt crisis but that one was looming.
The online versions of the Tribune and its sister paper, the Los Angeles Times, also ran a solid account by Christi Parsons. (Unfortunately, both the Post blog item and Parson’s piece relayed without comment a dubious claim from Boehner: that major federal entitlement programs are “going to go bankrupt” without major changes. See CJR’s Trudy Lieberman for more on that.)
And a brief, unbylined story attributed to McClatchy-Tribune showed up at, among other places, the website of the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
Taking note of Ryan and Boehner’s comments is just the first step, though. The real work for journalists is in digging into the follow-up questions their comments suggest, such as: If we don’t face a debt crisis now, how can we be sure one is “looming,” especially with deficits now falling and even Medicare cost growth slowing? What fiscal steps, if any, are needed to avoid such a “crisis”? And are the budget wars principally about addressing a “debt crisis,” or are they about advancing rival visions of the role of government?
But that work depends on a foundation built by informing readers about what leading politicians are saying. Yo, reporters and editors—take a look at what your newsroom has reported and what Boehner and Ryan said. Then figure out how to get this news into your paper, where it belongs.
Why would you assume that such mental giants as Boehner and Ryan know what they're talking about anyway? They're so owned by Wall Street as Obama and the Demfrauds are. Of course there's a debt crisis; there's been a debt crisis for many years. The Almighty FED can only paper it over for so long, though. The crash is inevitable.
#1 Posted by Dan A., CJR on Wed 20 Mar 2013 at 07:08 PM
People who don’t know what they’re talking about, but who want to sound erudite, love to use dramatic terms that can’t be disproved. A classic example is “ticking time bomb,” when referring to the federal debt and deficit.
This blog contains three posts (“Federal debt: ‘A ticking time bomb”; “Debt bomb redux”; “More debt bomb nonsense” ) sampling the thousands of times since 1940 (!), the debt has been called a “time bomb.”
The nice thing about “ticking time bomb”: The users never needed to prove or substantiate anything. They didn’t have to say when it would explode or what would make it explode or what would happen after it exploded. They don’t even feel the need to explain why their dire predictions have been wrong, wrong and wrong, every year. They could just use the expression, then stand back, look wise and bask in the adoration.
Well, another description of the federal debt and deficit can be included in the “I know nothing, but I want to look smart” club. This time the term is “unsustainable.” In a previous post I hoped never to see that trite, meaningless term again (See: Unsustainable), but it was not to be. Here are just a few of the uses in the past 28 years.
–February 7, 1982: Ronald Reagan: “[...]rapid, unsustainable expansion of Federal spending and money growth[...]
–December 11, 1983: The New York Times; Editorial Desk:“[...]large and growing deficits are unsustainable. They have to be reduced [...]
–1998: Douglas Elmendorf and N. Gregory Mankiw: “Current patterns of taxes and spending are unsustainable.”
—February 28, 2001: George W. Bush:. “Social Security’s spending path is unsustainable in the long run, driven largely by demographic trends.”
–March 3, 2005: Edmund L. Andrews: “Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve, warned on Wednesday that the federal budget deficits were ‘unsustainable,’ and he urged Congress to scrutinize both spending and taxes to solve the problem.”
–February 13, 2006: Paul Krugman: “Last year America spent 57 percent more than it earned on world markets. That is, our imports were 57 percent larger than our exports. It all sounds unsustainable. And it is.”
–05/15/09: Lita Epstein, DailyFinance, “Anyone who understands the U.S. debt picture won’t be surprised by President Barack Obama‘s statement that U.S. deficit spending is ‘unsustainable.’
–4/27/10: Reuters: By Pedro Nicolaci da Costa: “’In the absence of further policy actions, the federal budget appears set to remain on an unsustainable path,’ Bernanke told the 18-member National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform.”
–5/20/10:Professor Alan Blinder, former member of President Clinton’s original Council of Economic Advisers, and Vice Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System: “[...]even though everybody knows that the federal budget deficit is on an unsustainable path toward the stratosphere.”
And now, again: 6/10, 2010 The U.S. economy continues a slow, painful recovery, but Congress must prepare to address an “unsustainable” level of debt in the federal budget, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke cautioned Wednesday.
And again: 6/28/10: House Democratic Majority Leader Steny Hoyer: “Debt is a national security threat. Unsustainable debt has a long history of toppling world powers.”
And again: 7/8/10: The Committee For a Responsible Federal Budget: “The debt of the United States is rising to unprecedented – and unsustainable – levels.”
And again: 11/11/10: Representative Jan Schakowsky: “. . . we have to do something; the debt and deficit are not sustainable. . .”
–11/26/10: Sheila C. Bair, Chairman of the FDIC: “The Congressional Budget Office projects that annual entitlement spending could triple in real terms by 2035, to $4.5 trillion in today’s dollars. Defense spending is similarly unsustainable . . . “
–12/3/2010:Dick Durbin, senior Senator from Ill
#2 Posted by bambi, CJR on Fri 22 Mar 2013 at 08:33 PM