That is what he told us in his New York Times column that was ostensibly about out of control Social Security and Medicare spending. Emmanuel begins by telling readers:

If nothing is done about entitlement spending, and if our current tax breaks continue, then by 2025, tax revenue will be able to pay for Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, [...]

In a blogpost discussing the push by many groups to get a financial transactions tax the Post told readers:

The White House believes it would be easy to evade, could hamper economic growth, and might make markets more volatile, not less so. Instead, Obama has proposed a new “financial crisis responsibility fee” on big banks, which would raise [...]

Matt Miller is the perfect embodiment of the Washington punditry. In his weekly column in the Washington Post he complains about being a victim of the “False Equivalency Police.” These would be the people who point out that many of the assertions that he and other professional centrists make about the Democratic and Republican parties being taken [...]

David Brooks lectures us this morning on the need to have a balance between self-doubt and self-confidence. “Western democratic systems were based on a balance between self-doubt and self-confidence. They worked because there were structures that protected the voters from themselves and the rulers from themselves. Once people lost a sense of their own weakness, the [...]

When you hear the passive voice, as in “mistakes were made,” it’s a good idea to get out the ammunition. The Post gave us a great example in a piece that discussed the meeting of G-8 leaders and plans to deal with the euro zone crisis. The piece told readers that: “Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti [...]

I think what we have here is a failure to communicate. All the critics I know, like Paul Krugman, Brad DeLong, Mark Thoma and myself, have been very specific that the European Central Bank (ECB) will have to provide some form of guarantee for the debt of the crisis countries. It will also have to [...]

Robert Samuelson says that people are taking away the wrong lessons from JPMorgan’s $2 billion loss on a proprietary trade gone bad. He has some legitimate points but carries his case too far. First, he notes that this bet did not threaten either the banking system or JPMorgan. He points out that JPMorgan is a huge [...]

That is what readers of a front page article on the impact of austerity in Spain must have concluded when the Post told readers: “The tensions between tackling runaway deficits and stimulating the economy are in many ways akin to those facing the United States, where political leaders are struggling to agree on the right balance.” Actually, [...]

If the Washington Post doesn’t like it. That would explain the lead sentence of its lead front page story on the elections in France and Greece on Sunday: “The shrill anti-incumbent message that has emerged from a pair of European elections carries a threat to the U.S. economic recovery and a political warning for President Obama, whose [...]

Just in case you thought that the failure of austerity in the United Kingdom and across the euro zone, and its rejection by voters in France and Greece, might be cause for changing course, David Brooks has a column to tell us otherwise. He says that there are two different arguments going on over economic policy which [...]

Just when you thought that the Washington Post could not go any further in bringing its readers off the wall statements from self-imagined great thinkers, it rises to the occasion. Today we have Ian Bremmer, the president of the Eurasia Group, giving us ” five myths about America’s decline .” This short piece contains heaping doses of [...]

Peter Coy is ordinarily a pretty good reporter, but he really misses the boat with this chart , with the comment, “this jobs recovery is weak, all right, but right in line with the past two recoveries.” When you evaluate the strength of a recovery, you also have to consider the depth of the downturn that preceded it. [...]

I really don’t like to beat up on Ben Bernanke. I don’t know him personally, but everyone I know who does says that he’s a really nice guy. And, there is no doubt he is a very smart economist. But he shares the blame for the downturn with his former boss, Alan Greenspan. Even worse, [...]

It’s standard practice during the election campaign for presidential candidates to publish an autobiographical account of their rise to stardom or their philosophy of life and politics. However, in keeping with his commitment to innovative business practices, it seems that Mitt Romney has outsourced this task to Ed Conard, one of his former partners at [...]

That would have been an appropriate headline for a Washington Post article that essentially told readers that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner would focus on issues that matter to business in his discussions with Chinese leaders. The most important issue for workers in dealing with China is a drop in the value of the dollar relative to the [...]

The Washington Post was a strong supporter of NAFTA at the time the deal was approved. It continues to be a strong defender of the pact nearly two decades later. It has repeatedly shown itself willing to make up facts or just ignore them to push its pro-NAFTA line. An example of the former occurred [...]

David Brooks is playing the “it’s all so confusing, we just can’t really know anything about economic policy” game. The point is to try to make it intellectually respectable to question whether stimulus spending can boost the economy. This is important for the right, because the evidence from the austerity induced double-dip in the UK and [...]

Okay, I know that picking on George Will might seem like cheap fun, but as an oped columnist for the Washington Post we are supposed to take him seriously. Today Will is beating up on states that don’t follow his pro-rich prescriptions focusing on California and my home state of Illinois. Let me start with my [...]

Just as it refuses to accept global warming or evolution, much of the right is busy trying to deny the evidence on income inequality. As Thomas Edsall notes in his column today, they don’t have much of a case. The big point that they are hitting on these days is that most middle income and poor [...]

Readers will not doubt be asking if Japan can be saved from the Washington Post after reading Fred Hiatt’s column titled (in the print edition) “Can Japan Save Itself?” The column slams readers with large masses of inaccuracy that pass for conventional wisdom in Washington. The fun begins in the second paragraph which tells readers: “Much [...]