NPR Fellates the Power Elite (Again)

Well... it seems the Randroids, the Milton Friedman groupies, those fabulous Chicago Boys, and the rest of goobers are back again with failed neocon ideas. I guess they feel emboldened by an election that saw a marked decrease in votership result in the election of some of the dumbest, most regressive muthafuckas the nation has ever seen (click here or here for examples)... Of course, that sinister "libruhl" media is at it again.
::sarcasm off::

Economist, Dean Baker, sets the record straight...

NPR Thinks Cutting YOUR Social security and Medicare is Courageous

Dean Baker/ Beat the Press:

NPR again abandoned journalistic standards in pushing deficit reduction by insisting that doing so is courageous. Given the wealth of the people pushing for cuts to Social Security and Medicare, and the fawning attention that these people get from media outlets like NPR and the Washington Post, it is difficult to see what it is courageous about trying to take away benefits for middle class retirees.


It also wrongly described the deficit as "spiraling." Of course the deficit is not spiraling. The deficit rose in 2008-2010 because the housing bubble collapsed. NPR, like other news outlets, largely ignored the $8 trillion housing bubble. An honest discussion would point out that the deficit has temporarily ballooned because of the incompetence of people who carry through and report on economic policy.

In the longer term the deficit is projected to rise, but that is because of the projected explosion of U.S. health care costs. Our per person costs are projected to rise from more than twice the average in countries with longer life expectancies to more than three times as much.

Honest and courageous politicians and reporters would be talking about the real problem, a broken health care system. They would not be misrepresenting it as a problem of a spiraling deficit.

They're like zombies, no matter how many times you kill them off, they keep coming back no matter how spectacularly their ideas fail. And we have a handful of congolerates who control the vast majority of the media backing them up... SMH

-- Eddie usually blogs here