Selective Amnesia

Megan McArdle thinks it's just fine to use "Obamacare" and "Bush tax cuts."

I will stop referring to it as ObamaCare when we stop calling them the Bush tax cuts for the rich. It is an effective shorthand for a law that is otherwise unwieldy to describe. If legislators wanted me to call it something else, they should have given it a catchy name like "Medicare", not a hypertrophied piece of propaganda like the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. I don't know why the left considers the term particularly perjorative [sic]; it is a health care program, and it is Barack Obama's signature legislation. Why is it supposed to be undignified to attach his name to it? One of James' commenters says, "ObamaCare sounds like a term someone would use, hoping it fails miserably, and wanting people to remember who did it. So it is not non-judgmental. Quite the contrary."


Personally, I have no such lofty agenda; I just don't have a better term for it. But surely progressives think it is going to succeed. Shouldn't they be thrilled that the rest of us are associating Obama's name with it at every turn?


Update: Apparently I need to make clear that I don't think there's anything wrong with "Bush tax cuts for the rich", though I get some snippy conservatives who disagree occasionally. It's the easiest description, and everyone understand what you're talking about. I'm not trying to trade one for the other; I'm planning to keep using both.

Except when she doesn't.

Another day, another chart from the "non-partisan" Center on Budget and Policy Priorities on what "accounts" for the public debt. At some level, these exercises are silly: all prior legislation could be equally said to "account" for public debt, including, of course, Social Security and Medicare. These charts are usually just a dog-whistle where we pick out the programs we don't like and show that without them, things wouldn't be so bad!


But what is ridiculous-to-the-point-of-metaphysical-absurdity is the labeling of that big orange section as "Bush-Era Tax Cuts". The actual level of the debt incurred by tax cuts passed during the Bush era is represented by the size of the wedge in 2010, plus perhaps a modest amount of interest (interest rates right now are low, and over time, inflation and GDP growth should call that debt to fall, not rise, as a percentage of GDP.)


No, what that ever-widening wedge represents is the tax cuts passed in 2010, plus the assumption that the Obama administration makes the tax cuts permanent. I know that many liberal groups still see the pernicious influence of George Bush everywhere . . . but does the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities really think that we are still in the "Bush Era"? Is he the puppetmaster who pulled the string and made Barack Obama and the Democratic Congress dance? And if so, how come we passed a gargantuan new health care entitlement, instead of reforming Social Security?

This raises a question, of course: when do we think the CBPP will decide that we've finally left the Bush era? I'm guessing the answer is "Only after we've elected another president."

Heh, I could do this all day. That's what happens when a "journalist" is really a propagandist; accuracy and consistency are irrelevant.

If I ran or worked for the CBPP I would be very concerned about the constant trashing of my organization's reputation by one of the country's more respected knowledgeable ideological and omnipresent journalists. If a person makes a "mistake" and refuses to admit it, correct it, or stop making the same "mistake" it becomes libel, not error.