Media Matters reports that on his show today, Joe Scarborough blamed "'a Keynesian spending spree'" for the contraction in GDP at the end of 2012," while literally holding up a Wall Street Journal article showing the opposite:
Scar held up the WSJ because he liked the headline ("Recovery Shows a Soft Spot") but didn't bother to read (or more likely ignored) the article's assertion that:
Meanwhile, government spending, which has been a drag on growth for more than two years, declined for the ninth time in 10 quarters. The biggest cuts came in military spending, which tumbled at a rate of 22.2%, the largest drop since 1972. But state and local spending also fell, dashing hopes of stabilization after a rare increase in the third quarter.
So it's not the
growth of government spending that's hurting the economy, it's the
decline in spending. It's bad enough that Scarborough has the audacity to think he knows more than Paul Krugman. But here he's contradicting the right wing daily bible, the WSJ (the news pages, not the op-ed, of course).
Unsurprisingly, "liberal" co-host Mika did not correct him.