Time Magazine Really Working Overtime For Hit Pieces on Tea Party

At Hot Air, Enter the Cocoon.

If hyperinflation arrives, Time Magazine wants its readers to know who the real culprits are. It won’t be the federal government that hiked annual spending by 38% in three years and began running trillion-dollar deficits. It won’t be the Congress that kept raising debt limits to allow for that spending spree. And it won’t be the Federal Reserve that, in desperation over the government’s spending and debt spree, began printing money to artificially keep interest rates low. No, the real culprit will be the political movement that opposes all of the above, according to The Curious Capitalist...

And here is "The Curious Capitalist:"

Sarah Palin is concerned that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke may cause inflation to shoot up and stay there. But could the greatest potential culprit of wealth-destroying, Germany-1930s-type hyper-inflation be, not the central bank, but Palin and the Tea Party? That in part is the conclusion of some recent research by Indiana University professor Eric Leeper and Wall Street economist Troy Davig of Barclays Capital. In a recent paper, called Temporarily Unstable Government Debt and Inflation, which can be downloaded from this website, Leeper has a chart that he unofficially calls the Tea Party shock graph, on page 25. Before the Tea Party, inflation is rising slowly. But in the first year the Tea Party or a group with similar views wins the Presidency or takes over Congress, whamm-o. Inflation doubles, and keeps going up. He wrote the paper in October, so he puts the potential date of Tea Party takeover as 2019, but after this election Leeper concedes Tea Party induced hyper-inflation could come much sooner than that. So is Palin riding the Hyper-Inflation Express? Maybe. Here's why...

The "why" seems to be that this liberal analyst really, really wants to raise taxes -- as a check against inflation, I think -- and the Tea Party is very anti-tax-hike so, you know, the Tea Party will cause inflation, by bitterly clinging to its anti-tax-hike stance.

Inflation comes from the government printing more money, and the government prints more money when its books are dramatically unbalanced, and they get that way from a mismatch of high spending and low taxes, and this is Time Magazine we're talking about, so of course it is simply not even inquiring as to whether the culprit could be that "high spending" part. Of course it's the "low taxes" part.

Ipso facto, presto chango, and the Tea Party is now responsible for the coming inflation they've been warning of and in fact came into existence precisely to speak out against.

Meanwhile, President Kickass and his trillion-dollar deficits and quantitative easing (it's not his policy per se, but he offered words of support and encouragement for it) are entirely blameless.

Unbelievable.

Meanwhile: Also at Hot Air, Axelrod now saying that Obama would except a temporary extension of the Bush tax cuts for the highest income brackets as the price for keeping the rest of the tax cuts.

This is especially interesting given Time's theory that low tax rates will be the one and only culprit if inflation spikes -- so, then, Obama's to blame, I guess?

Of course not; Obama is merely bending to political reality; he remains blameless.

This is a cutesy paradigm liberals always deploy. Liberals want gay marriage, of course; so who is to blame for the current prohibition?

Republicans politicians? Of course-- they oppose it, in the main.

Democrats? Like Obama, who says he's anti-gay-marriage? No. Obama gets a pass because "political reality" is forcing his hand.

The liberal media always does this to excuse away positions they don't like in politicians they do. Republicans are never given a pass for also being reflective of, and captive of, public will. Republicans are assigned full blame, as if they are entirely above and beyond considerations of political reality and have an entirely free hand in selecting their position. Therefore, if they select a position liberals don't like, they are fully morally culpable.

It's only Democrats, apparently, who are ever influenced by public opinion to take positions liberal commentators don't like. Democrats are innocent as lambs because they have good intentions. (Which the media assumes -- they assume, for example, Obama really wants gay marriage, despite the fact that he never says so. So, they assume he's lying. It's a fair assumption-- but then please note he is lying to the public, huh?)

So once again Obama will take a position liberals claim is repugnant and/or disastrous but that's okay, after all, he's just doing what he needs to do to be elected.

Like when Robert Byrd started his own Klan chapter.

posted by Ace at 11:45 AM

| Access Comments