There Are 25 Million People Unemployed, Underemployed or Out of the Workforce Altogether and NPR's Presidential Debate Moderator Just Wants to Talk About the Budget Deficit

NPR seems to want listeners to ignore the economic downturn, by far the largest cause of the deficit, and to focus on cutting spending programs and raising everyone's taxes. That was certainly the theme of its interview with David Wessel, an economics reporter with the Wall Street Journal, which discussed his new book, Red Ink.

The first sentence of the piece refers to the "ballooning deficit." In fact the deficit is actually shrinking. While NPR can argue that the deficit is larger than it w...