I was driving to work this morning listening to NPR when I heard that there was going to be a story on how the government should handle the budget deficit. Luckily it was going to be a balanced story with a Republican and a Democrat giving their points of view on the subject. Unfortunately, the resulting views expressed were more like the right versus the far right. The link to the story is here: http://www.npr.org/...
Yep, on the right we had Democrat Mark Warner and on the far right we had Suxby (sic) Chambliss. These guys seemed to agree on a lot of stuff that had to do with spending cuts and benefits reductions, but not much was said about options for revenue generation since that is not a policy the right or the far right can embrace.
Senator Chambliss informed us that what the Debt Commission recommended was that “when you reform the tax code the way they suggested, you will actually lower income taxes” (WTF?). Senator Warner countered by saying that the retirement age for Social Security should be raised because the “life expectancy in America now is about 80” and that "the math here is just irrefutable.”
The math in both cases is refutable. I mean, are we really going to lower taxes and raise revenue? Fat chance. And, what about those life expectancy numbers? Well, you could say that the life expectancy in the U.S. is as close to being “about 75” as it is to being “about 80” (it is 75.4 for men and 80.4 for women), but of course the Democrat in this story still felt the need to promote the “must reform Social Security” meme by fudging the numbers on the high side.
Is there some kind of shortage of real Democrats to interview for stories like this? I mean, when we have a bullshit story with one extreme right wing senator and another GOP-light senator making their cases by citing the mostly partisan Debt Commission and skewing their numbers to make their case, it just makes me sick. NPR, if you really want a balanced news story, why not try getting a real progressive to counter the Republican instead of a Blue Dog Democrat?