September 04, 2012 04:43 PM UTC

Denver Reporter Demolishes Paul Ryan In Five Easy Sentences

•  
• by: Colorado Pols

The redoubtable Eli Stokols of FOX 31 strikes again, this time via satellite:

The noted deficit hawk who is the author of the controversial House GOP budget plan blamed President Obama for adding to the country’s ballooning deficit because of the 2009 stimulus package and Obamacare, which was signed into law last year.

“It’s actually the economy that’s given us the deficit we have and the massive deficit spending and domestic spending we’ve seen under President Obama,” Ryan told FOX31. “Yes, the wars are a small part of it.”

Actually, the Iraq war, which Ryan voted to authorize, will cost the nation more than $3 trillion; and the Bush tax cuts, which Ryan also voted for when they first took effect in 2001, will ultimately cost the nation $3.2 trillion if extended again through 2021. [Pols emphasis]

The stimulus, by comparison, came at a price tag of $787 billion…

We really need folks to stop for a moment and look again at what Eli Stokols, political correspondent for a local FOX affiliate in a major market, has done here. Like just about every other reporter in America, or at least the majority of them uncritically reprinting whatever fact-free nonsense gets circulated by a presidential or other electoral campaign, Stokols let GOP vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan get his unabridged talking point out there in all its accusatory glory.

But then he did something unusual: he debunked it. Right there.

Because it’s a simple, demonstrable fact that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and elsewhere) since 2001 have cost many times what President Barack Obama’s stimulus bill did. The Bush tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003 cost many times what the stimulus did. Stokols could have gone farther and noted that “Obamacare” is projected to reduce the deficit, not grow it, or how plunging federal revenues in the recession widened deficits, not “massive deficit spending and domestic spending.” But even without those, this is one of the most succinct and damning refutations of the central GOP talking point in the 2012 elections we’ve seen anywhere.

And again we ask, why doesn’t every reporter do this? Stokols makes it look frustratingly easy.

Because if they did, if every American understood a few basic facts at the root of every fiscal policy debate in America today, we might be having a very different election season.