Jan 9, 2009
Media Matters: Conservative media peddle a raw deal
by Jamison Foser
The conservative punditocracy that has spent the past eight years propping up a president who gave us an illegitimate war and leaves us with an almost unimaginably bad economic crisis apparently grows weary of defending this spectacular failure of a president. And so they have begun to shift their efforts to an easier task: trying to turn Americans against the president who ended the Great Depression, initiated the minimum wage, created Social Security, and helped defeat the Nazis.
Yes, they're trying to bring Franklin Roosevelt down to George W. Bush's level. Good luck with that.
On Fox News, for example, Brit Hume insisted this week that "everybody agrees, I think, on both sides of the spectrum now, that the New Deal failed."
Unless by "both sides of the spectrum," Hume means "far-right ideologues who have shows on Fox News and far-right ideologues who do not yet have shows on Fox News," he's overstating the consensus by a fair amount.
Economist Paul Krugman, for example, disagrees.
Krugman may not have the gravitas that comes with being Washington managing editor of Fox News, but he does hold the most recent Nobel Prize in economics. Krugman says the New Deal included "long-run achievements" that "remain the bedrock of our nation's economic stability" and "brought real relief to most Americans" and notes that "by 1937, things were a lot better than they were in 1933." According to Krugman, the New Deal would have been even more successful had Roosevelt not been "eager to return to conservative budget principles."
Ben Bernanke disagrees with Hume, too. Bernanke has neither a Nobel Prize nor a gig at Fox News -- but he was appointed to chair the Federal Reserve by President Bush. Bernanke wrote in his Essays on the Great Depression: "Only with the New Deal's rehabilitation of the financial system in 1933-35 did the economy begin its slow emergence from the Great Depression."
So liberal Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman says the New Deal was a success, and the Bush-appointed Fed chair says the New Deal was a success. That's quite a broad spectrum of people who disagree with Brit Hume's assertion that "both sides of the spectrum" agree that the New Deal failed....
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The reason for the conservative media's assault on FDR is clear: With a new president facing economic crisis, conservatives want to prevent him from stimulating the economy via government spending on things like unemployment benefits and infrastructure. Such spending would not only help people who need it most, it would also do more to stimulate the economy than would the tax cuts Republicans prefer. And that's according to Mark Zandi, who was economic adviser to John McCain.
So why don't conservatives want Obama to pursue such stimulus plans? Because they're rigidly opposed to government spending as a matter of ideology. Well, let me amend that: They're rigidly opposed to government spending by progressives. They're rigidly opposed to government spending on things like health care. They're wildly enthusiastic about government spending on things they like; government spending increased rapidly under Bush, just as it did under Ronald Reagan....
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The conservative pundits...don't want to deal with the economic crisis by spending money on things like unemployment benefits and much-needed infrastructure improvements. And they don't want to address the situation by giving tax credits to the people who most need them and would be most likely to spend them (the whole point of including tax cuts in a stimulus package in the first place).
So what does that leave us with? Oh, right: tax cuts for the rich....
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In other words, conservatives don't want to return to Franklin Roosevelt's policies, they want to continue George W. Bush's.
http://mediamatters.org/items/200901090016?f=h_latest
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