Welcome to the interregnum edition of You’re Overthinking It. This edition will come out in between our regular Sunday pieces, and will be shorter and more to the point. Nobody has ever accused me of being short and to the point.
But I’ll try.
I will also sometimes send out pieces of people I follow, who inform my thinking and have expertise I don’t necessarily have. Like Zach Silk, an economics writer whom I think is a must-read.
On February 15, I read two articles about the same thing - the Congressional Budget Office’s just-released report. It was as if I was reading two different articles. What’s the difference? The framing.
The first was a New York Times piece* written by politics reporters Jim Tankersley and Alan Rappeport - and edited and headlined by someone whose name we do not readily know.
This is the headline:
Sounds bad. Sounds like just what the MAGA Republicans who are threatening to hold the debt ceiling hostage have been telling us. But… not really.
The Times’ story is 18 paragraphs. Here are the first two. They jibe with the headline:
The writers are implying that Social Security and Medicare are to blame here. They then seem to use this info as an excuse to normalize undemocratic behaviors by a minority of people in the House, as they write that “the updated projections could supercharge a partisan debate between President Biden and Republicans over taxes, spending and the nation’s debt limit.”
As I’ve written before, if two teams come to play baseball, and one team decides to just hold the ball and not play until the other team gives them 10 runs, reporters should not write, “There is disagreement among the teams.”
In the ninth paragraph - halfway through their piece - Tankersley and Rappeport write this:
Wait… what? Isn’t that… good news?
I’ve been hearing since the 80s - when the debt went up precipitously under President Reagan - that we were passing on a weakened economy to our children. But the only thing that has weakened the economy in the last 40 years is deregulation of banking and other industries that caused the savings and loan crisis, an energy crisis in California driven entirely by Enron, and the 2008 Wall Street meltdown, to name just three.
In the twelfth paragraph, Tankersley and Rappeport clarify that half of the spending increase that is vexing the CBO comes from the toxic burn pit bill for military veterans. In the fourteenth paragraph, they lay out that half a trillion of the extra debt comes from increased military spending outside of the burn pit compensation. And they stressed a few times in the piece that the Fed’s decision to raise interest rates was a big culprit in the CBO’s projections.
In the fifteenth graph, they write:
After that graph, they note how Congressional Republicans reacted to the CBO report. They do not note how Democrats reacted.
That evening, I got Heather Cox Richardson’s daily Letters from An American, which recaps the day’s news with a bit of historical perspective.
Cox Richardson started with a speech given that day by President Biden at an IBEW local in Maryland, touting the economy and the infrastructure and growth plans he passed with bi-partisan Congressional support. Her third paragraph (out of 15) was:
Cox Richardson also noted what many economists I read have been saying - that the 2017 tax cuts added over $2 trillion to the deficit. I will add that, despite campaign promises to the contrary, the Trump Administration did not create manufacturing jobs.
In paragraph 7, she gets to the nut of the issue: “Republicans want to address the rising deficit with spending cuts; Biden, with taxes on wealthy Americans and corporations.”
Cox Richardson does not say “this will contribute to the fight the two sides are having.” She doesn’t mention the debt ceiling at all. Because that is a different issue than the budget negotiations. The debt ceiling is to pay for every budget Congress approved under Trump.
Eventually, both of these pieces say the exact same thing: the CBO came out with a report that says the deficit will go up, but it won’t hurt the economy, and the drivers are mainly issues that Republicans like, not Biden’s policies. But if you stopped reading the Times piece before the halfway point - or even just stopped at the headline as most people do - you wouldn’t know that.
*I have a fair amount of acquaintances who are or were Times reporters, but not politics reporters. They describe an atmosphere in which the politics guys think of themselves as gods, and where criticism of “both-sides journalism” is verboten. Remember, the Times got rid of their public editor in 2017.