Michael Lind

Dennis Cauchon at USA Today has been one of a very few establishment press reporters willing to expose federal workers' disproportionate pay and benefits (previous examples here and here) as well as Uncle Sam's precariously dangerous financial situation.

Cauchon has two USAT items today on the latter topic (HT to NB commenter Gary Hall): "U.S. funding for future promises lags by trillions," which reports that federal obligations totaled $61.6 trillion as of September 2010, a $5.3 trillion increase from a year earlier, and "Government's Mountain of Debt," which itemizes those obligations by major source.

Unsurprisingly, 75% of federal obligations, or a combined $46.2 trillion (actually more, which will be seen at the end of this post), relate to Social Security and Medicare, which no one but a few deluded leftists believe (or pretend to believe) are sustainable in their current form. Unfortunately, at the end of his first story, Cauchon quoted one of them, Michael Lind, whom the USAT reporter described as "policy director at the liberal New America Foundation's economic growth program," who said the following:

The first two paragraphs of a recent Salon Magazine piece by Michael Lind on Obama's plans for America's future are striking for the utter lack of any relationship whatsoever between them. The lack of cognitive dissonance between them is amazing but easily proves that liberals don't have the first idea what an economy is.

This Salon piece is proof once again of the stark difference between reality and the liberal mindset of slavish reliance on the concept of a Keynesian style of big government. If we could spend our way out of economic hard times, as Lind praises Obama for advocating, then why are we now having such hard times? The government already spends far, far more than it takes in, yet here we are talking about recession, even depression. If all we had to do was initiate wild spending projects to solve our problems, then we simply would not be in hard times. Yet, here is Salon and Lind praising Obama for announcing absurd, pork laden spending projects as if that will solve everything. It didn't work for the U.S.S.R. and it won't work for us (and, no, it didn't work for us in the past either. Look at FDR's utter failure to fix the Great Depression. We only came out of that when WWII came along).