For historical reasons, I receive the Charlotte Observer. I’ve always noticed a left-leaning tilt in the paper’s news reporting, but I recently began to read the opinion page. What I found justifies the paper’s secondary name (the Charlotte Disturber). A couple of weeks back, after Jack Kemp passed away, a columnist penned a scathing editorial about how Jack Kemp supported policies that decreased poverty and helped the middle class, and how this was evil because the people he helped became less dependent on the government. The only reason I did not burn the paper is because I am not interested in causing unnecessary carbon dioxide emissions using a Marxist rag.
For an example of the lies therein:
Cut taxes, they argued, and watch the economy take off like a rocket.
What they never spelled out for the electorate was that most of the tax cuts would go to the rich, that the rich would harvest most of the money from the increased economic activity, and that the radically reduced tax revenue would send government budget deficits streaking toward the moon.
Never mind that the poverty rate actually fell under Reagan, productivity increased, GDP soared, and inflation virtually disappeared. Never mind that Reagan’s tax cuts increased government revenue, and the real cause of the deficits (which Democrats pretend to hate, but consistently expand to record proportions when they are in office) was military spending.
Oh, and never mind that Reagan shifted the real tax burden towards even more towards the top 10, 5 and 1 percent, and decreased the real tax burden of the bottom 50 percent.
Today, the Disturber published an article by Paul Krugman, who, like Yasser Arafat and Al Gore, holds a Nobel Prize. Krugman argues that increased FDIC insurance for certain types of depository institutions provided perverse incentives to those institutions.
Did I just read a Paul Krugman article slamming government intervention in the market incentive system? Could this trend continue? No. He only did it to hate on Reagan. Krugman supports the destruction of the market incentive system in all other cases. See Peter J. Wallison’s rebuttal to Krugman’s unacademic article.