Reason Editor suggests his own magazine is lying
By Glenn Greenwald
"The Congressional Budget Office now reports that this bill will reduce our deficit by $132 billion over the first decade, and by as much as $1.3 trillion in the decade after that" -- Barack Obama, Tuesday.
"Obama's Latest Health Care Lie: There are actually multiple lies and deceptions in [Obama's] paragraph, beginning with the verb 'reports' to describe what the Congressional Budget Office does. The CBO, as Peter Suderman documented in his foundational Reason feature on the organization, does not 'report,' it 'projects,' in highly speculative fashion, what a proposed piece of legislation may cost" -- Matt Welch, Editor-in-Chief, Reason, yesterday, writing next to a photo of Obama with a Pinocchio nose.
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So according to Welch, Obama "lied" because he used the word "report" to describe what the CBO does and because he suggested the CBO's projections are reliable. What, then, does that say about numerous Reason editors and writers, who wrote the following back when Reason loved the CBO because it was reporting that Obama's health care proposal and other policies would increase the deficit? Using Welch's "reasoning," it must mean that Reason's staff is filled with outright liars:
Reason Editor Peter Suderman, July 10, 2009: "I won't dispute that Medicare is popular, or that politicians -- even Republicans -- don't usually criticize it, but it hasn't exactly been an unqualified success. On the contrary, as the CBO reports, the program's fiscal future looks dire."
Suderman, Reason, July 27, 2009: "In response to the Congressional Budget Office's report that current health-care reform proposals were unlikely to solve the country's long-term budgetary problems, the Obama White House put forth a plan to reduce spending it hoped would prove to be a 'game changer'."
Ronald Bailey, Reason, April 7, 2009: "A 2007 Congressional Budget Office (CBO) study reported the results of a hypothetical 23 percent cut in carbon dioxide emissions (the Waxman-Markey bill proposes a 20 percent cut by 2020). The CBO found that 'giving away allowances could yield windfall profits for the producers that received them by effectively transferring income from consumers to firms' owners and shareholders'."
Veronique de Rugy, Reason, February 10, 2009: "How bad is the stimulus bill just passed by the Senate? . . . . Don't take my word for it. In a report to Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) laid out in plain English—well, economic language—that the Senate bill would eventually cause not a stimulus but a recession in 'the longer run'."
Ronald Bailey, Reason, September 29, 2009: "About half of all growth in health care spending in the past several decades was associated with changes in medical care made possible by advances in technology," declared a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report last year."
Ronald Bailey, Reason, December 23, 2008: "But will comparative effectiveness research really reduce health care spending, as Daschle claims? Not by much and not soon, according to a 2007 report by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), if the research is limited to comparative clinical effectiveness. . . . The CBO report makes it clear that comparative clinical research won't significantly cut health care costs."
When it suits them -- meaning when the CBO issues negative findings about Obama's domestic policies -- Reason holds up the CBO as an authoritative oracle not to be questioned. Three weeks ago, Reason's Nick Gillespie warned of "massive premium hikes" based on "the CBO's latest assay of the Senate's health-care reform plan." In March, Reason's Jacob Sullum cited CBO decrees to warn that "federal deficits will total $9.3 trillion during the next decade if Congress implements President Obama's fiscal proposals." Just last month, Suderman himself cited the CBO's conclusions to argue that health care reform was not deficit neutral. In September of this year, Suderman claimed that the CBO had contradicted Obama's statement that "nobody is talking about reducing Medicare benefits" and wrote: "this sort of direct contradiction from an agency as respected as the CBO isn't going to do much to calm seniors' fears." The same month, even Welch himself cited CBO reports -- using the verb "analyzed" -- to argue that Obama "lied" in his claims about health care.
For the first half of the year, Obama's right-wing opponents heaped praise on the CBO's authoritative stature because, back then, the CBO was reporting that the Democrats' health care proposals would increase the deficit. These same individuals then completely and shamelessly shifted gears once the CBO began reporting that the revised iterations of the proposal would actually decrease the deficit. And the "principled non-partisan libertarians" at Welch's Reason led the way in this rank intellectual dishonesty.
