Enter
the budget impasse with Republicans: “some beneficiaries pay
more” and “chained CPI.”
On Twitter, John Harwood pointed out the obvious: those magic
words are on Obama’s publicly
available sequestration offset plan!
From there, Murphy went
through the elements of Chait’s
prophecy like a grieving widower
going through Kubler-Ross. He insisted, wrongly, that Obama had
“refused CCPI as part of the fiscal
cliff deal,” then called CCPI a “small
beans gimmick,” then insisted that
“Obama must move first on spending, earn trust”— which ... he did.
As Klein points out, “Over the
course of 2011, Obama signed into
law a set of bills that cut about $1.8
trillion from discretionary spending, and that included no tax increases at all.”
Klein summed this up ably:
“Recall what Chait said
would happen if the
Republican legislator in my
column was forced to react
to the fact that Obama has
endorsed chained CPI:
“He would come up with
something – the cuts aren’t
real, or the taxes are awful,
or they can’t trust Obama
LOOKING FORWARD
IN ANGST
HUFFINGTON
03.10.13
to carry them out, or
something.” Check, check,
and check.”
Nice and nicely done. But you
can see the structural disadvantage that those seeking “mark to
market” accountability in this debate face. It takes a Marvel teamup of three different reporters,
from three different news organizations, to perform this elementa-
Banks are allowed
to essentially treat
[toxic] assets as ‘marked
to fantasy,’ a hoped-for
future value that is unlikely
to ever be realized.”
ry act of real-keeping. Meanwhile,
Bill Keller can, in one column,
undo the work of Harwood, his
New York Times colleague.
There’s an easy economy to the
centrist pundits’ work: They just
keep writing the same piece, over
and over again. So getting the balance sheets of the centrist clique
back into balance is going to be
a long, hard slog. But every little
bit helps to slowly deconstruct this false façade.