Photo

Steve Benen catches PolitiFact falling down on the job. But it’s actually even worse than he says.

What happened was that Eric Cantor spoke Sunday about our “growing deficit”, when in fact the deficit is shrinking rapidly. Yet PolitiFact managed, somehow, to declare Cantor’s claim “half true”.

The crucial point here, however, isn’t just that Cantor said something unequivocally false. It is that he said something that gets the whole story upside down.

The central fact at the heart of any rational fiscal debate right now is that deficits are coming down fast, even as the economy remains depressed. The sharp decline in deficits means that the medium-term debt outlook is no longer remotely scary; indeed, even if you project out to 2030 it doesn’t look too bad. At the same time, sharply reducing deficits in a depressed economy, with interest rates up against the zero lower bound, looks like extremely bad macro policy.

So that’s what we should be discussing: do we want deficits coming down this fast?

Yet here we have a senior GOP official talking as if we lived in an alternative universe in which deficits are rising, not falling. And PolitiFact declares his statement half true.

It is, of course, the same old problem: news organizations in general, and PolitiFact in particular, are set up to deal with a world in which both parties generally respect reality, and in which dishonesty and delusion are roughly equally distributed between the parties. Faced with the highly asymmetric reality, they choke — treating mild Democratic exaggerations as if they were equivalent to outright falsehoods on the other side, treating wild misrepresentations on the GOP side as if they were slight misstatements.

This should be simple: PolitiFact should just rule on the facts; it should seek to be party-blind, which isn’t the same as being “nonpartisan”, with its connotation of “balance”. But apparently it can’t do it.