The News Journal Editorial Board has decided to weigh in again on the Recovery Package — against FTR — and to do so in a way that serves not only as a symbol of the real lack of basic economic knowledge of folks in the media, but also is an example (one of many) of how awful this paper continues to get. To wit:
- They complain that the package does not follow economists’ guidance of being “quick, temporary and targeted.” The OMB, of course, tells us that 65%+ of the House Bill will be spent in 2 years (the stated goal) and 75%+ of the Senate Bill will be spent in the next 2 years. If you read the bill at all, you’ll note that the multiple hundred pages of these bills is a targeted list of spending priorities and none of them comes with a perpetual spending provision. Additional money to the Recovery program pools would need to be authorized by Congress in subsequent budget years.
- Their only stated measure of the quality of the bills is the total price tag — so that the Senate Bill ends up being better than the House Bill because it is cheaper. If you are going to invoke economists’ guidance for the shape of the bill, you’d think that they’d do that to assess the quality and effectiveness of the bill.
- The NJ Editorial Board makes this remarkable claim: “spend a lot of money on favored groups and pet projects across the country. ” You’d think that an outfit overseeing a real reporting organization would have , you know, done some reporting on this to back it up. But, there aren’t any stories done by NJ reporters that have produced any detailed analysis of the bills, sorting out the pork from the stimulus. And if they ever really knew the difference between the two, I wouldn’t hold my breath on them ever producing this reporting or analysis.
- Related to that, it seems to me that if these items are political payoffs — as this editorial claims — that there ought to be some killer reporting to be done in tracing the connections between these items to the politicians who promoted them and what else may have transacted in that process. So where is this reporting, NJ?
- Taking both parties to the woodshed for name-calling is weakly noble, but doesn’t exactly mask this Editorial Board’s real intent here: “the average American needs more of his or her own money to stay in his or her own pocketbook.” So they are advocating for more tax cuts. And again, without invoking the economists’ views that they selectively invoked for the shape of the bill. And those views are that tax cuts don’t provide much stimulus. But you’d also think that a group of people calling for more tax cuts would have actually produced some reporting on the effectiveness of tax cuts AND what said tax cuts might mean for the budgets of the state and municipalities in Delaware.
(more after the jump.)
This editorial is a bad audition for the completely tin-foil hatted WSJ Editorial Board — fact-free, pushing an ideological point, faux high-mindedness in the service of that ideological point. The difference, however, is that the reported part of the WSJ is still one of the best papers in the US, still trying to do serious reporting. And the NJ? They are just pretending that they are attached to a real newspaper.