FYI The New York Times is not now nor has it ever been a "liberal" newspaper. It has been more given to honest reporting than the right wing propaganda machine but it is nonetheless one of the masters tools that supports the wealthy and corporate state.
From World Socialist Web Site: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/apr2011/pers-a15.shtml
15 April 2011
An array of media liberals are hailing the deficit-reduction speech given by President Obama Wednesday, in which he called for trillions of dollars of cuts in domestic spending. Praise came from columnists like Paul Krugman of the New York Times and E. J. Dionne of the Washington Post; one particularly delusional pundit compared Obama’s words to those of liberal icon Eleanor Roosevelt.
The most significant voice of American liberalism, the editorial page of the New York Times, headlined its editorial on the speech, “President Obama, Reinvigorated.” Its first sentence gushed: “The man America elected president has re-emerged.”
The editorial piles on the flattery of Obama, with unwarranted praise of the supposedly huge political distance between his policies and “Republican plans to heap tax benefits on the rich while casting adrift the nation’s poor, elderly and unemployed.” If one pursues this simile, the actual difference is that Republicans are openly hostile to the victims of American capitalism, while Obama pretends sympathy, offering those who are drowning a rope that is far too short. The end result is the same.
The editorial makes much of Obama’s call to raise taxes on the wealthy, while saying nothing about the president’s past performance. Obama caved in last December to the Republican demand to extend the Bush tax cuts for the rich, even when the lame duck Congress was still controlled by the Democratic Party. Now that the Republicans control the House of Representatives, there is no prospect of increased taxes on the millionaires, and Obama’s pledge is both empty and cynical.
The Times declares that Obama’s budget proposal “should have been less fixated on spending cuts at the expense of tax increases,” and notes that his proposed cap on healthcare cost increases “was surprisingly low … and it is not clear that that goal can be met without harming providers or beneficiaries.”
Since the Times has been an extremely vocal advocate of healthcare cost cutting, particularly targeting supposedly excessive use of medical services by the elderly and the seriously ill, such assertions are mere window-dressing. The editors seek to disguise the fundamentally reactionary character of both the Obama healthcare plan, passed last year, and the new measures proposed by the administration to cut $1.5 trillion in healthcare costs over the next 20 years.
The editorial goes on to criticize Obama from the right. It expresses regret that he did demand more sacrifices from working people by “reminding those in the middle class that their incomes taxes remain low and will need to go up” and by proposing additional consumption taxes “like energy taxes … or a value-added tax.”
Continue reading at: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/apr2011/pers-a15.shtml
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