in a Good World, the Washington Post Would Have Closed Long Ago

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps? Over to Paul Krugman:

Fiscal Shock: I see that the Washington Post editorial board is shocked, shocked to discover that the incoming Republicans aren’t serious about deficit reduction. Who could have suspected?

I was going to be snarky all the way here, but actually let’s be serious: the gullibility of much of the media establishment on all this amounts to journalistic malpractice. Republicans have, after all, been the party of fiscal irresponsibility since 1980; the GW Bush administration confirmed, if anyone was in doubt, that unfunded tax cuts are now in the party’s DNA. Then along comes a Democratic president who presides over all of two years of deficits in the immediate aftermath of a severe financial crisis – which is a time when you’re actually supposed to run deficits. Republicans begin inveighing against the evils of red ink – and, incredibly, get taken at face value. And even if you didn’t know the history, if you actually paid attention to what leading Republicans were saying, their lack of seriousness was totally obvious. You had the Ryan plan, which claimed to reduce the deficit but, if you actually looked into it at all, relied completely on magic asterisks; you had the declarations by top Republicans that deficits are terrible but there’s no need to offset the cost of tax cuts.

The idea that these people were allowed to pose as deficit hawks is stunning.

Oh, and for those claiming that Republicans have always said that spending, not deficits is what matters... this is very much revisionist history; you can’t denounce the federal debt, then claim that you never cared about the revenue side of things. Beyond that, the deficit scare tactics lately have been all about solvency, not mere crowding out... [for] solvency... the deficit, not spending, is what matters...