26th
The truth can’t be messaged.
Ezra Klein on why the deficit freeze means we (wonks) lost the battle over the price of health insurance reform:
[Y]ou can’t look at this as anything less than a tremendous defeat for the Obama administration. It’s not the policy itself. The freeze locks in a post-stimulus, and potentially post-jobs-bill, level of spending. It’s not terribly onerous. But it’s also the administration’s white flag on the argument that the deficit must be understood as a health-care reform problem rather than a taxes and spending problem. This was their most audacious effort to change the way Americans think, and it didn’t work. For all the effort Democrats put into building a health-care bill that cuts the deficit, a full 60 percent of Americans think (pdf) the legislation increases the deficit. Only 15 percent think it’s a deficit reducer.
Agreed.
But the failure is not for lack of trying. It’s for the fact that it’s much easier to message “Democrats are doing this, this costs money, increases the deficit, and the CBO is being gamed” than to message “this costs money now, but saves money later (and some of those savings are not scoreable by CBO’s normal methods); the short-term deficit is a non-issue (in the context of current monetary conditions/prevailing Treasury rates), and the medium- and long-term deficits—reasonable people think—are helped by this, or are at least better than the trajectory of doing nothing; and, yes, some components are scheduled in certain years to get certain scoring from the CBO, but it’s a minor issue relative to the total projected savings, and the savings all reasonable people think will accrue in the out years.”
What we have here is the failure of (our best guess at) truth to be legible.
[Please also note my great self-control in not making a “massage”/”message” & “truth” pun.]
