Washington Post: The Problem is 'You', Not 'We'

Imagine a major national newspaper that never saw an $8 trillion
dollar housing bubble. Suppose its most often cited expert on the
housing market was the chief economist of the National Association of
Realtors, who also authored the 2006 bestseller: Why the Housing Boom Will Not Bust and How You Can Profit From It.

Yes, I'm talking about the Washington Post, which had the gall today to run a column by Jim Hoagland
complaining about how "we" are passing on a bad world to our children.
The "we" in the column is meant to refer to the generations currently
in their 40s, 50s, and 60s, who he claims are leaving huge problems to
our children.

He's right about the problems, but he's wrong about the "we."

The reality is that the Washington Post and the elite
clique for which it is a mouth piece have badly failed us and our
children. The housing bubble was easily recognizable. The economic
disaster that we are now facing could have been easily avoided if the
Washington Post and its elite friends (e.g. Alan Greenspan, Robert
Rubin, and Henry Paulson) were not too incompetent or corrupt to see
the evidence of problems everywhere. Needless to say, those of us who
did try to issue warnings were ignored by this elite crew.

The Washington Post has whined endlessly about the long-term deficit problems facing the country. But how often has it told its readers that the long-term deficit problem is almost entirely the result of the broken U.S. health care system:
a system that costs more than twice as much per person as the health
care system in most of the countries who enjoy longer life expectancies
than we do?

Perhaps the Post does not choose to share this information
because it identifies with the wealthy people who run the insurance
companies, the pharmaceutical companies, and the highly paid medical
specialists, all of whom get rich off the waste in our health care
system. (Perhaps the fact that these industries advertise heavily in
the Post also affects its willingness to print pieces exposing the
enormous waste in the U.S. health care system.)

The Post also has been a big proponent of a trade policy that is
based on selective protectionism. The Post's trade policy subjects less
educated workers (those without college degrees) to competition with
low-paid workers in the developing world, while leaving the most highly educated workers largely protected from such competition.

Since the vast majority of the workforce falls into this unprotected
category, most of our children will see lower standards of living
because of the Post's trade policy as it redistributes income to its
elite friends. The Post even applies the euphemism "free trade" to its policy of selective protectionism to make it more palatable.

I could go on at considerable length. The list of the failings of the Post and its elite friends is long -- lying to get us into the war in Iraq would be the next obvious item on the list.

The point is that the Post and it crew of cronies have badly failed the world in a large number of ways and continue to do so. The Post
and Hoagland's efforts to attribute the blame to the rest of us for the
trouble caused by the greed and incompetence of their elite clique
deserve nothing but contempt and ridicule.