The convention in mainstream journalism is that the new stories give you the facts, and the columnists give you their opinions (hopefully backed by facts). But in the coverage over the debt ceiling and budget debates sometimes you're better off heading straight to the columns. Today offers a good example. In the Washington Post (7/15/11), Ezra Klein lays out the political dynamic that is rarely explained. As Klein writes, the White House has decided to

offer Republicans a deal that is not only much farther to the right than anyone had predicted, but also much farther to the right than most realize. In addition to the rise in the Medicare eligibility age and the cuts to Social Security and the minimal amount of revenue, it would cut discretionary spending by $1.2 trillion, which is an absolutely massive attack on that category of spending.

In the New York Times (7/15/11), Paul Krugman writes:

President Obama has made it clear that he's willing to sign on to a deficit-reduction deal that consists overwhelmingly of spending cuts, and includes draconian cuts in key social programs, up to and including a rise in the age of Medicare eligibility. These are extraordinary concessions. As the Times's Nate Silver points out, the president has offered deals that are far to the right of what the average American voter prefers — in fact, if anything, they’re a bit to the right of what the average Republican voter prefers!

The conventional coverage--which pits Obama's offer against Republican intransigence--tends to gloss over these facts. The front-page article in the Times today by Jackie Calmes explains the debate as being between Obama's desire to raise taxes on the wealthy and cut the deficit, while Republicans prefer "smaller government" and lower taxes. It quotes Sen. John McCain saying that the  "president keeps talking about spending more money"--with no explanation that Obama is actually proposing to reduce non-security domestic federal spending as a percentage of GDP to its lowest level in 50 years.

These are the limits in the media debate. The fact that the public would seem to prefer an entirely different type of budget deal is a non-factor. The fact that such plans exist--the People's Budget of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, for instance--is all but ignored by the corporate media. Senate Democrats have floated a similar plan.  A competent press corps would cover these proposals, if only for the sake of telling citizens that such options are available--that reducing the long-term deficit is possible without slashing spending on  programs that people support.

But the media would much prefer a budget debate that pits Obama's Republican-leaning plan against the Republicans who oppose that plan.

Big news in the New York Times today (1/21/11): According to their new poll, Americans overwhelmingly support slashing military spending.

Wait--that's not the news.

According to the story by Jackie Calmes and Dalia Sussman (headlined "Poll Finds Willingness to Cut Spending, Just Not Medicare or Social Security"), the real story is that people don't like the idea of cutting these entitlement programs, but are really worried about the budget deficit:

While Americans are near-unanimous in calling deficits a problem--a "very serious" problem, say 7 out of 10--a majority believes it should not be necessary for them to pay higher taxes to bridge the shortfall between what the government spends and what it takes in.

The Times has tried to tell us this story about the deficit before (though at other times they've told us the opposite).

If you read far enough into today's piece, the Times alludes to a different way of gauging public sentiment--one that finds people don't feel very strongly about the deficit:

Asked what Congress should focus on, 43 percent of Americans say job creation; healthcare is a distant second, cited by 18 percent, followed by deficit reduction, war and illegal immigration.

And elsewhere in the poll (but not in the Times story) they ask people to name the most important problem facing the country. The deficit garnered 6 percent support.

In other words, it's not at all clear that people overwhelmingly worry about the deficit. They do seem far more willing, though, to cut the military budget:

And asked to choose among cuts to Medicare, Social Security or the nation's third-largest spending program--the military--a majority by a large margin said cut the Pentagon.

Which leaves one to wonder why the headline wasn't "Poll Finds Broad Support for Military Cuts."

The other main lesson of the Times poll is that Americans don't support tax increases. The Times notes that the "antitax sentiment reflected in the poll is in line with Republicans’ mantra that spending, not taxes, is the problem for the federal budget." So the public doesn't want higher taxes, and doesn't want spending cuts--which the Times writes up this way: "Americans' sometimes contradictory impulses on spending and taxes suggest the political crosscurrents facing both parties."

But the tax questions in the poll mostly ask whether respondents want to raise taxes on "people like you." Obviously many  people aren't going to like that much. The Times posed one question that included a menu of tax options: increasing the gasoline tax, reducing the mortgage interest deduction, and so on. But they should have posed other options--raising taxes on the wealthy (i.e., people who mostly aren't "like you"), or a Wall Street financial speculation tax.

The story the Times wants to tell is a familiar one: The public wants to have it both ways (no spending cuts and no tax increases either). But reality's a little different. The public wants action on jobs much more than on the deficit. As far as the deficit is concerned, they're overwhelmingly ready to cut military spending. And, as some other polls have found, they're more than OK with raising taxes on the wealthy. As one Bloomberg survey found (12/10/10):

While they say they strongly support balancing the budget over the next 20 years, when offered a list of more than a dozen possible spending cuts or tax increases, majorities opposed every one of them except imposing a bigger burden on the rich.

But that is clearly a story that New York Times does not want told.

Right here on November 12, we asked what the New York Times means when it talks about "centrism"-- specifically when it comes to Beltway deficit reduction plans. The Times framed the proposal from deficit commission co-chairs Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson as offering the Obama White House an opening to move to the center. That piece, written by Jackie Calmes, was updated by the very same Jackie Calmes today (11/29/10), as she reported on two pending deficit reduction plans from the liberal/progressive side. As she wrote:

Liberal organizations will unveil debt-reduction proposals of their own in the next two days, seeking to sway the debate in favor of fewer reductions in domestic spending, more cuts in the military and higher taxes for the wealthy.

The "liberal" plans call for additional stimulus spending on infrastructure, a healthcare public option, a tax on Wall Street speculation, deeper cuts in military spending.  This is apparently in contrast to some of the "centrist" plans, which do not include a public option or a Wall Street tax, but do include tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy.

Again, the problem here is terminology and ideology. The corporate prefers "centrism" in most cases; in this particular example, a plan that seems objectively conservative is labeled "centrist" because a (conservative) Democrat and a (conservative) Republican came up with it. In contrast, plans that would seem to feature policies that are popular with the public at large are "liberal," and should be evaluated in contrast to the "centrist" vision.

Reporting on the proposal from debt commission chairs Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, a New York Times article (11/11/10) by Jackie Calmes framed the discussion this way:

Mr. Obama created the commission last February in the hope it would provide political cover for bold action against deficits in 2011. His stance now, in the wake of his party's drubbing, will go a long way toward telling whether he tacks to the political center-- by embracing such proposals--or shifts to the left and leaves them on a shelf.

The duo's proposal is a remarkably regressive plan to cut Social Security benefits and tax rates for the wealthy, while shifting a greater tax burden onto middle-class Americans. (Paul Krugman writes an excellent column in today's Times explaining all of this.) But by the political calculations of the Times' national desk, embracing these proposals is centrism.

Today (11/12/10), Calmes writes of Obama adviser David Axlerod's suggestion that the administration might extend Bush tax cuts for the wealthy:

While David Axelrod, Mr. Obama's senior strategist, subsequently denied that the White House position had shifted, the immediate suspicion among liberals that the administration was abandoning them reflected broader insecurity among the president's allies on the left that he would move to center for the rest of his term.

This would imply that giving tax cuts to the wealthy is also part of a move towards the center.

I think most people who follow politics pretty closely have a decent sense of what "liberal" and "conservative" mean, broadly speaking. The media preference is for politics that hew to the "center." But it's very difficult to know what that means; examples like this would suggest that the "center" is located somewhere well to the right.

On today's front page, under the headline "Deficit Divisions Likely to Grow After Election," New York Times reporter Jackie Calmes writes this lead:

WASHINGTON -- A midterm campaign that has turned heavily on the issue of the mounting federal debt is likely to yield a government even more split over what to do about it, people in both parties say, with diminished Democrats and reinforced Republicans confronting internal divisions even as they dig in against the other side.

It is difficult to know what to make of this; the Times recently noted that the public doesn't spend much time thinking about the deficit. ("The deficit barely registers as a topic of concern when survey respondents were asked to volunteer their worries," was how the paper put it.)  It's hard to figure how a non-issue could be so important to the campaigns--other than as a useful talking point for some Republican politicians.

Calmes goes on to talk about possible spending cuts post-election, referencing the "unsustainable combination of fast-growing entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare and inadequate tax revenues."

Reporters often lump Social Security and Medicare together as unaffordable entitlements. But the programs face very different budgetary pressures.  Graphs that plot the estimated costs of both show that Social Security's expansion over the next several decades (measured as a share of the total economy) is modest compared to Medicare, which is poised to grow substantially (and thus is the far more important story by any standard). But many in the corporate media dwell on Social Security instead, often presenting it as a test of Democrats' political courage:

Democrats are also split on fixing Social Security's long-term solvency. Mr. Obama had wanted to tackle the issue early, and he created the debt commission by executive order--after Senate Republicans blocked legislation--partly in the hope that it would propose future benefit and payroll tax changes he could embrace. Some Democrats say he will have all the more reason to lead that charge after the elections, to signal a more centrist, fiscally conservative course. Yet liberal groups have already formed a big coalition to lobby against any such move.

That would have been the right place to quote someone who would explain that "fixing Social Security's long-term solvency" is at best a minor issue.

In a story about the Senate Finance Committee voting down two amendments that would have added a public option to the committee's healthcare bill, New York Times reporters Robert Pear and Jackie Calmes (9/29/09) write, "The votes vindicated the middle-of-the-road approach taken by the committee chairman, Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana."

The Times just had a poll that found 65 percent of respondents were in favor of a public option, with just 26 percent opposed.  To call the approach favored by the rightmost one-quarter of public opinion "middle-of-the-road"--well, maybe someone ought to take away Pear and Calmes' car keys and call them a cab.

Jackie Calmes reports in the New York Times (2/23/09):

The president signaled in his campaign that he would support addressing the retirement system’s looming financing shortfall, in part by applying payroll taxes to incomes above $250,000. But that would ignite intense opposition from Republicans, especially with the economy deep in recession.

Liberal Democrats are already serving notice that they will be equally vehement in opposing any reductions in scheduled benefits for future retirees. But any solution, budget analysts said, must include a mix of both approaches, though current beneficiaries would see no change.

Really?  Budget analysts said it was impossible to balance Social Security's books without tax increases and benefit cuts?  That's odd, considering that Social Security's 75-year shortfall amounts to about 1/300th of projected GDP.  Were these the same budget analysts who described a system that is projected to need help paying its obligations starting in 2041 as having a "looming financing shortfall"?