Orszag Goes Postal Against the Wall Street Journal
OMB Director Peter Orszag blasted the Wall Street Journal editorial page today for its opposition to health care reform. He contrasts the fact that health reform will be fully paid for as scored by CBO to the Journal's support for supply-side economics in the 1970s and 1980s, the centerpiece of which was a big tax cut in 1981 with no budgetary offsets.
www.whitehouse.gov/omb/blog/09/12/14/No-Illusions/
I think this is a stretch and probably unwise, politically, because it elevates the Journal's critique and will cause even more attention to be paid to it. As I have written previously, the real hypocrisy of Republicans was that they passed the Medicare Part D legislation in 2003 without paying for a penny of it--it was a pure give-away to buy the votes of the elderly. That legislation will cost approximately $1 trillion over the next 10 years--all of it coming out of general revenues. In this respect, Peter is quite right to emphasize that Democrats are paying for their proposed health reform. Republicans who oppose it because it will add to the deficit don't have a leg to stand on--especially those who voted for Medicare Part D.
