There are times when you have to wonder whether liberal shills in the media are are just ignorant or dishonest.
Monday is one of those times.
Consider Nobel laureate Paul Krugman's most recent column in the New York Times entitled "Hey, Small Spender" wherein the man the Left considers to be one of the economic geniuses of our time argues that federal spending really hasn't increased under President Obama.
Most deviously, the Nobel Prize winner in economics never once actually referred to actual figures from the budget to prove his point:
Here’s the narrative you hear everywhere: President Obama has presided over a huge expansion of government, but unemployment has remained high. And this proves that government spending can’t create jobs.
Here’s what you need to know: The whole story is a myth. There never was a big expansion of government spending. In fact, that has been the key problem with economic policy in the Obama years: we never had the kind of fiscal expansion that might have created the millions of jobs we need.
You got that? It's all a myth - until you get to the fourth paragraph:
To be fair, spending on safety-net programs, mainly unemployment insurance and Medicaid, has risen — because, in case you haven’t noticed, there has been a surge in the number of Americans without jobs and badly in need of help. And there were also substantial outlays to rescue troubled financial institutions, although it appears that the government will get most of its money back. But when people denounce big government, they usually have in mind the creation of big bureaucracies and major new programs. And that just hasn’t taken place.
Hmmm. So Obama didn't increase spending - just before before he did. Sounds almost Kerryan, doesn't it?
Have you noticed the conspicuous absence of actual figures? Want to know why? Because they don't support the premise.
George W. Bush's fiscal ’09 budget originally called for outlays of $3.1 trillion. With the financial crisis, this grew to $3.52 trillion.
FY ’10 spending rose to $3.72 trillion, and FY ’11 is projected to be $3.83 trillion. That's a 24 percent increase in less than three years!
Now you know why Krugman chose to make his case without sharing the data?
But here's the best part:
The answer to the second question — why there’s a widespread perception that government spending has surged, when it hasn’t — is that there has been a disinformation campaign from the right, based on the usual combination of fact-free assertions and cooked numbers.
Isn't that marvelous?
Krugman pens a piece for the Times, about the increase in federal spending under Obama being a myth, without using any data to support his premise, and then accuses the right of a "disinformation campaign" on this subject "based on the usual combination of fact-free assertions and cooked numbers."
And the Times editors and ombudsman let him get away with it.
What a joke!
