When Conventional Wisdom Rules and Even Leaves the NJ Confused

If you’ve been reading the NJ Editorial page over the past week or so (I know, I know), you will find that the Editorials are still filled with the usual (and lazy) conventional wisdom, but you will have also noticed that this CW leaves them endorsing multiple competing positions. Take a look:

Extend Bush Tax Cuts, But Don’t Abandon Jobless

Deficit Panel Understands What Nation Really Needs

Tax and Budget Certainties Are the Essential First Step

You can likely tell where I’m going here by just reading the titles, but really you should read each of them for a full dose of the Conventional Wisdom. In three columns, the NJ Editorial crew endorse extending both the Bush tax cuts and unemployment benefits (more spending and borrowing); they endorse a (very flawed) deficit reduction plan (cutting back spending and borrowing); and then they endorse budget and tax *certainty* (more tax cuts) (more spending and borrowing). You can see their theme of endorsing tax cuts, but they still (like many Americans) endorse the borrowing (and payment of interest) caused by those tax cuts.

The Conventional Wisdom on this subject is pretty completely in the service of having your cake and eating it too. People get to be spending and deficit scolds while advocating tax cuts that specifically add to the deficit. But I don’t think that it is too much to ask for folks at a newspaper to step outside of the Conventional Wisdom and ask “How do we know that?” before just foisting it on your readers. Tax cuts, of course, are not about business certainty. There isn’t going to be much hiring because wealthy people got tax cuts. (People get hired because there is certainty of demand for services or goods.) Neither is deficit reduction. And how they get Wilmington’s homicide rate in there is just plain clueless. It would be useful if the NJ would step into the adult conversation and ask questions and think through policy before just repeating what the cable partisans have been (wrongly) trying to pound into the conversation.