Craig Gurian

...can keep Congress and the press from shortsightedly focusing on "balanced" budget reductions despite a stalled economy and both long-term and short-term experience with the folly of austerity. It's like one of those arguments where you may think you're making headway, but where you get to the end and you might as well have saved your breath. Can anything prevent Democrats from seeking to give up hard-won gains?

A perennial conceit of much of the press is “we don’t make the news, we only report the news.” A just-released poll, however — revealing overwhelming support for greater income and wealth equality — underlines how much real news has been ignored by reporters preoccupied with centrism and compromise as all-weather solutions.

The abandonment of the element of the Affordable Care Act that was designed to provide insurance against the staggering costs of long-term care, announced by the Obama administration last Friday, raises important questions about the wisdom of having a strategy of always going for a legislative "half a loaf," especially when doing so obliges you both to understate the real costs of dealing with problems and to oversell the promise and potential of your solutions.

In other words, a little from column A and a little from column B. By stubbornly resisting the possibility that one faction's prescription (even a liberal Democratic or a Tea Party Republican one) can sometimes be correct to the exclusion of all other options, formula replaces reporting.

Chrysler employees, we are given to understand, are thrilled to be working in the auto industry, even if they are forced to accept wages much lower than their colleagues. What do we learn about what this means for their lives? Nothing.

In other words, a little from column A and a little from column B. By stubbornly resisting the possibility that one faction's prescription (even a liberal Democratic or a Tea Party Republican one) can sometimes be correct to the exclusion of all other options, formula replaces reporting.

Get ready for spending cuts beyond the debt ceiling agreement. That deal only calls for spending caps, not spending floors. The regular appropriations process must be completed by Oct. 1, or else government operations shut down. The GOP will insist that those bills impose additional cuts. Any Democratic assertion of resistance will have no credibility in face of documented pattern of surrender. Oops. Turns out that costs and benefits of giving in to debt-ceiling hostage-taking were hopelessly miscalculated.

You can’t go five minutes without reading press accounts that characterize the Obama-Boehner budgetary prescription — now’s the time to start on $4 trillion in debt reduction — as “ambitious.” Is there anything less ambitious than plans to guarantee that our children and our grandchildren will live less well than we do?