Krugman: Policy Indifference

[ProSense]

Policy Indifference

One crucial thing you need to understand about political journalists is that with some honorable exceptions, they don’t know or care about actual policy. In a way, that makes sense — the skills needed to cultivate contacts, to get the inside scoop on what’s going on in Congressional scheming or campaign war rooms, are very different from the skills needed to interpret CBO spreadsheets. The problem, however, is that all too often political journalists mistake the theater of policy for reality (or don’t care about the difference).

Hence, the awful decision of Politico to give Paul Ryan an award as healthcare policymaker of the year.

Even if you like the thrust of Ryan’s ideas, even if you think privatizing Medicare and turning it into a voucher scheme is fine, what became painfully, embarrassingly clear during the debate over the Ryan plan was that Ryan is, well, incompetent; the plan was a mess, from its invocation of ludicrous Heritage Foundation projections to its crazy assertions about what would happen to discretionary spending. It’s true that the plan “got everyone talking”, as Politico says — but mostly it got people talking about what a mess Ryan’s effort was.

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What’s going on here, I suppose, is that Politico is mistaking theater for policy. Ryan isn’t an important health care reformer, or even minimally competent in his attempted wonkery, but he plays a deep thinker on TV. And the people at Politico either don’t understand the difference, or they don’t care.

The media and fact checking organizations appear to be operating in a parallel universe where Democrats lie and Republicans are brilliant!

Must be that liberal bias!





Edited for clarity.

[saras]

1. So sweet. So naive. So innocent. So dense.

They KNOW the difference, probably better than you do, as they have an inside track into the process.

They HAVE to care, or they won't be able to report what they're paid to report, and might include inconvenient facts instead, resulting in their instantaneous loss of their position.

OF COURSE they know what they're doing. They could hardly do it as well as they do by accident.