There’s no denying that the U.S. has a massive $40 trillion debt problem. But the degree to which CNN actually treats it for the existential issue that it is only depends on which administration is in the White House.
CNN Business’s waffler-in-chief and senior reporter David Goldman tried his hand at finger-wagging in a September 11 item headlined, “America can’t grow its way out of its debt problem.” Goldman sneered at Trump’s supposed method for dealing with America “staring down the barrel of $40 trillion in debt,” and mocked it outright: “The Trump administration has a novel solution: We’ll just grow our way out of the problem.”
CNN and the other networks very rarely "stare down the barrel" of the national debt. It's not a sexy issue.
But Goldman apparently forgot that the internet exists. In December 2020, then-CNN Business digital correspondent Paul R. La Monica instructed president-elect Biden to forget the national debt and spend like a drunken sailor to deal with the pandemic economy in a piece headlined: “Forget the deficit for now. We have to spend our way out of this pandemic.”
La Monica was adamant, even as left-wing economists like Larry Summers were warning that out-of-control stimulus spending would send inflation to the moon, that “a growing sense that the incoming Joe Biden administration and Congress will need to continue to kick the debt can down the road and focus on spending more on stimulus in the midst of the coronavirus crisis.”
Oh, and how did that work out? That pathetic excuse for a strategy would lead to the Biden administration to spike the total U.S. debt by $9.21 trillion or by 32.4 percent according to Investopedia August 21. In fact, per Investopedia, “Based on fiscal-year comparisons, Joe Biden added the most to the national debt in total dollar terms during a presidency.” And that’s a separate bullet point from the 40-year high inflation disaster that kind of thinking spurred on.
Basically, CNN’s logic is as follows: Trump can’t grow the economy out of its debt crisis, but Biden should ignore the debt crisis and artificially juice the economy into a sugar high because government spending itself out of a problem makes total sense. As a sub-header in La Monica’s so-called “analysis” put it, “Spend more now but pay the price later?” Holy contradiction, Batman!
But now that Trump is in charge, the dangers of the debt has all of a sudden been dragged back into the spotlight. But even Goldman couldn’t maintain a coherent logic in his critique. Following his insinuation that Trump’s solution was a “novel” one, he then undercut himself completely by admitting the idea is actually grounded in established economic theory:
“The administration’s theory is grounded in a degree of real economic theory: If the US economy grows at a significantly faster rate, its debt would eventually become relatively sustainable.”
That’s literally the antithesis of what classifies as a “novel” remedy. Oh but in his estimation, “The math just doesn’t math. Inflation is making a comeback, spending is out of control, and Washington has no political will to fix either problem.” How did the math “math” when Goldman was telling Biden to chuck debt concerns out the window and make money grow on trees? The same network that downplayed the threat of the debt when Democrats won the White House is now treating a growth-plus-restraint approach as unserious because the pendulum of political control shifted rightward.
This is CNN.
