NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday brought aboard another lefty whose far-left views are usually only heard on MSNBC, but Joy-Ann Reid, Managing Editor of TheGrio.com [1], the NBC News site aimed at African-Americans, perfectly reflected the true liberal view of how to boost the economy. It’s not a “balanced” approach of budget cuts and tax hikes. She urged higher taxes and more spending.
“When you look at the economy and the fact that it isn’t growing more strongly, we’ve been trying to force ourselves to do austerity,” Reid ludicrously asserted in the midst of ever-increasing federal spending. She fretted the inability “to do a robust agenda from Washington that does smart spending and smart tax increases,” regretting that “without being able to do sane policy in Washington,” you can’t expect Obama to fix the economy.
Before sliding seamlessly into NBC News and MSNBC, Reid worked in Florida for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.
Reid, on the May 5 Meet the Press, defending Obama:
I don’t think that there’s any objective facts that could really help the President with this particular Congress. I mean, I think some people have described the current Republican Party as sort of post-policy because really they’re so fixated on opposing Barack Obama that I’m not sure there’s any objective set of facts that could change the calculus of how he’s able to deal with them. I think what we have is a Republican Party that needs to decide that it has to actually govern, that just opposing Barack Obama is not enough.
And when you look at the economy and the fact that it isn’t growing more strongly, we’ve been trying to force ourselves to do austerity which has not worked in Europe, which has actually harmed the European economy. And so without being able to do a robust agenda from Washington that does smart spending and smart tax increases the way we did in 1993 when Democrats alone, without a single Republican, passed that omnibus budget bill in ‘93 that actually got 90 percent of the way toward the fiscal balance we achieved in the ‘90s, without being able to do sane policy in Washington, you can’t expect interpersonal relationship improvement to change the economy.
-- Brent Baker is Vice President for Research and Publications at the Media Research Center. Click here [2] to follow Brent Baker on Twitter.