I’ve read The Economist for decades, and always found that it gave me a head start on breaking events of about two months. But I’m reading it less now: its reasoning powers and willingness to penetrate to the truth in economic matters seem to have failed it. There’s better information available through specialized economic sites.
The financial crisis has shown The Economist at its worst, completely unreliable when it comes to reporting the glaring flaws in capitalism. Far too many times in its recent opinions and analyses has the newspaper come out with disingenuous fluff, supporting equity over equitableness.
Witness how The Economist reacted to the Obama budget, in a leader headlined A wishful first budget – Wishful, and dangerous, thinking and subtitled, “The president has not explained to Americans that if they want bigger government, they will have to pay for it“
My annotation to my Diigo-bookmarked piece reads”
The Economist has not been making much sense lately, and its leader on Obama’s proposed budget seems couched in rhetoric about taxing the rich that really doesn’t address the fundamentals of the US economy, or even the objectives of the budget. To complain about “growing government” in a time of a notoriously failing private sector seems rather ideological. A shame.
As I’ve found consistently the last few months, the comments are where the sound reasoning appears. Reader bampbs was first off the mark with his usual sensible observation:
March 05, 2009 22:38 bampbs wrote:
To expect an attempt at wholesale reform of the tax system in the midst of the worst economic collapse since the ’30s is spectacularly unreasonable. It is a fact that the GOP has been the party of fiscal nonsense, by cutting taxes and raising spending. The only periods since WW2 in which the national debt as a percentage of GDP increased were the 12 years of Reagan/Bush1 and the 8 years of Bush2. So calm down. I suggest we give President Obama more than a few weeks.
And this comment spelled out my own feelings about the mild hysteria regarding the imminent ambush by socialism:
March 05, 2009 23:53 solarflares wrote:
There continues to be false hand-wringing about “big government” and “socialism” as President Obama attempts to put a plug in the dike and prevent further erosion of the US and global financial crisis. A large number of highly respected economists and European Finance Ministers have suggested that the biggest flaw in his plan is that it is “too little.”The complaints, of course, emanate primarily from the apologists for the “rich and famous” that are purportedly the champions of “free enterprise” and capitalism. The truth is that this whole group has benefitted by an almost unprecedented period of power in business, finance, government, and – unfortunately – the media. They have done little for the “wealth” of the societies they come from but became, instead, the masters of the casino.
What, really, is the “danger” in Obama’s thinking? Is it that modern aristocracy will lose its privilege and that the other 90% of the population of the world will gain a little more power? It will take time to overcome the mythology of the Reagan/Thatcher years but no society that has survived that has had the levels of disparity that exist between the rich and poor that exist in the US and the UK. Short-term greed always leads to long-term upheaval.
