Really. When I read The New York Times editorials about the economy, or the truly shallow reporting from most of the paper's reporters, often I think: the people at The New York Times actually are dolts. They don't understand economics--at all. But, more often, it's worth considering--they actually believe what they write, even if there is such a deep disconnect from one point to another.
This was the most recent example--and, trust me, you could really find examples virtually every day in that newspaper, as well as virtually every traditional media organ. In an editorial entitled, "Pushing Back Against Austerity", the paper wags its finger at Europe:
Political leaders across Europe have begun to push back against the campaign of Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany to put the Continent’s economies into a straitjacket of unrelenting fiscal austerity. It is about time. Two years of insisting that weak economies carry out tax increases and spending cuts have brought nothing but recession and deepening indebtedness.[emphasis added]
I almost snapped the head off my Marie Antoinette doll. Wait, the paper that has relentlessly stoked the fires in the U.S. about the obsession over a non-existent debt crisis, praising austerity measure after austerity measure, whether it was some Gang in the Senate or the phony "bi-partisan" presidential debt commission, and demanding massive cuts in federal spending--that paper has changed it stripes?
Not to worry. The end of the editorial sets us straight:
Temporary easing of the targets need not lead to permanently larger deficits. If flexibility is linked to structural reforms like more open labor markets, lower pension costs and a more rational tax code, it can bring back the sustained growth needed for long-term balanced budgets. For center-left parties, it is politically easy to call flexible deficit targets. They could enlist broader political support for such flexibility if they also strongly embraced the more difficult labor market, pension and tax reforms. [emphasis added]
Whew. OK, reality at The Times was restored. I almost thought someone at The Times editorial page had actually, suddenly, understood that "open labor markets" (read: so-called "free trade" that the newspaper has been flogging for two decades) had laid the ground work for the austerity that millions of people around the world are living with right now (meaning, wages being pushed down by trade based mainly on corporations finding the lowest wages possible, which, in turn, forces people to live on plastic or other debt), and that someone also understood if you lower "pension costs" (meaning, cut benefits) then, duh, people are not going to be able to make ends meet--which, hello, is austerity.
So, to return to the real world: what is valuable here, in the foolishness of the editorial, is to understand how the frame that the traditional media pushes, adopted and, recycled and enhanced by political leaders in both parties, is at the heart of the mess we are in. They don't get what austerity means--because they never have to live in the reality austerity creates.