By David Cay Johnston

The author is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

The Washington debate over whether to voluntarily default on the U.S. government’s obligations revealed a serious political ailment in Congress: mass economic amnesia.

Just 11 years ago, Republicans insisted budget surpluses were bad for the economy,air jordan, while Democrats told us surpluses would make the economy flourish. Al Gore said pay off the federal debt; George W. Bush said cut taxes so people would have more money.

During the Bush years Democrats decried the red-ink budgets, while Republicans assured us that no real harm would come from a $5 trillion borrow-and-spend spree.

Yet last weekend it was the other way around. The Democrats described a few more years of deficit spending as vital to making up for massive loss of jobs, while Republicans warned that any more red ink would destroy America as we know it. Feeling confused? You should be. And maybe,chaussures air jordan, like the Beijing government, you see the checks-and-balances the framers of the U.S. Constitution put in place to provide sound government replaced by farce.

There is a cure for bad political posture. Just dose yourself with the best elixir ever for manufactured crisis: facts. The posturing in Congress having stretched any sense of reality beyond recognition, here are 10 facts that would have informed the debate on Capitol Hill and can certainly inform your understanding of the federal fiscal follies:

COUNT TO 10
1. No sovereign government with monopoly control of its currency can go broke in its own currency. Since the Constitution gives Congress a currency monopoly it is axiomatic that talk of our government going broke is nonsense unless we have a revolution, in which case federal bonds won’t be worth the electrons used to keep digital track of them.

2. Gross federal debt today is up 250 percent from when President Bill Clinton left office, and up 35 percent from when President George W. Bush left office, but the government’s blended average interest rate has fallen 54 percent since Clinton and 22 percent since Bush, suggesting that the bond rating agencies’ warnings about the chances that federal debt will be serviced as promised are as reliable as their estimates of the likelihood that all those mortgage bonds would be Triple A investments.

3. Had America stuck by the tax-and-restrained-spending policies of President Clinton,air jordan, and his budget projections proved reliable, the government today would have no debt. Instead it would have a surplus of $2.1 trillion, or nearly $7,000 per American.

4. President Obama’s first budget, for fiscal 2010, that began on Oct. 1, 2009, had a smaller deficit than President Bush’s last budget, which promised a $407 billion shortfall, missing the mark by only a trillion dollars.

5. Those Wall Streeters President Bush bailed out in his final days continue with their risky bets because, being too big to fail, they sense Washington is ready to bail them out by swapping their red ink for government black ink, a belief reinforced with campaign contributions to make sure the government spends little on banking regulators.

BOTH POLITICAL PARTIES
6. President Obama’s original budget ended a host of Bush-era devices that understated budget deficits, while at the same time laying out a plan to cut the deficit he inherited by half, partly by raising taxes on the top two percent of earners,air jordan pas cher, but the Republicans most worried about red ink worried even more about taxing billionaires too much.

7. Federal budget deficits as far as the eye can see would be significantly smaller but for Obama acquiescing to Republican demands to extend the temporary Bush tax cuts for all and Democrats,air jordan pas cher, who also rely on rich donors,nike air jordan, meekly going along with it.

8. Federal individual income tax revenues in 2010 were smaller than in 2001,jordan pas cher, the recession year when the Bush tax cuts began. Revenue was down by $330 billion or 27 percent. Because America’s population keeps growing, income taxes per capita fell 32 percent from $4,310 per American to $2,910, making it harder still to balance the budget.

9. Healthcare costs rose just 3.9 percent in 2010, the smallest annual increase in modern times, according to the federal Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services actuary,air jordan soldes, while by 2020 the Affordable Care Act (what critics call Obamacare) will add just a tenth of one percentage point to healthcare costs while adding 30 million more Americans to health insurance rolls.

10. The deal to avoid voluntary default calls for squeezing Medicare and Medicaid spending even more while making sure the richest among us enjoy lower tax rates than the middle class do. A result will be more luxuries at the top, while pushing 40 percent of hospitals toward bankruptcy,air jordan femme, though not until 2050 when about 40 percent of Americans living now will be beyond any benefit from hospital care.

Both political parties contributed to our federal debt. Manufactured crises like the debt ceiling vote mask the real issue, which is our desperate need for prudent policies that create broad prosperity by taxing, spending and managing debt for the good of country,air jordan, not party.? (Editing by Howard Goller)

By Jack Shafer,air jordan pas cher
The views expressed are his own.

London’s Metropolitan Police, who helped cover up the U.K.’s phone-hacking scandal for the better part of a decade, have finally figured out how to crack the case. Attack the press.

The Guardian, which kept the story alive after Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World minions,air jordan, top politicians,air jordan femme, and the cops throttled it, that the Metropolitan Police have requested a court order to force two of its?reporters, Amelia Hill and Nick Davies, to surrender their confidential sources from their Milly Dowler phone-hacking story. Hill has already been by police.

The Met is making its demand under the? , which is usually invoked in national security cases. In 1985, Ministry of Defence employee Clive Ponting was under the act for divulging information about the sinking of an Argentinean ship during the Falklands War. In 2002, counter-intelligence officer David Shayler was of giving secret documents to a newspaper. In 2003, U.K. government employee Katharine Gun was under the act with leaking to a reporter email from the National Security Agency requesting help in bugging the United Nations offices of six countries.

But the act’s fine print also criminalizes leaks of “damaging” information by government officials that could impede the prosecution of criminal suspects. It’s through this window that the police hope to push their court order.

Although I’m appalled by the Met’s assault on the freedom of the press (as we ACLU sympathizers like to say),nike air jordan, I’m mollified by the fact that after years of dilly-dallying, the Metropolitan Police are finally taking the phone-hacking case seriouslyeven if they are punishing a pair of reporters whose only crime is having uncovered long-term wrong-doing that the police previously entombed. The real criminals in the phone-hacking scandal are, of course, the newspaper editors and reporters who hacked phones or ordered them hacked; the private investigators who did the journalists’ illegal bidding; the newspaper executives (Rebekah Brooks? James Murdoch? Les Hinton?) who facilitated the crimes; and the police who, for reasons of self-preservation, pushed the scandal under the carpet.

The circular logic behind the Met’s request for a court order delivers more torque than a spinning Ferris Wheel: The police want the Guardian‘s reporters to surrender the confidential sources who blabbed about the illegal phone-hacking, arguing that the stories are impeding an investigation. But the police had for years deliberately ignored the information that was ultimately leaked to the Guardian! There was no police investigation for the Guardian to “impede” until the Guardian brought the facts to the public’s attention and the public demanded that the police do their job!

Had the Guardian reporters not “impeded” the police investigation, News of the World journalists and their like-minded colleagues in the press would have remained undeterred in their efforts to break the law to break news. Likewise, we probably would have never learned that News of the World hacked a dead girl’s phone, simultaneously interfering with a police investigation and giving the girl’s parents false hope that she was alive.

That the police have a grudge to settle with the Guardian and the press goes without saying. The press has been making life miserable for the cops. Earlier this summer, the Guardian‘s Davies that police have collected thousands of pounds of bribes from a detective employed by journalists. Reuters’ Mark Hosenball also the existence of e-mail traffic okaying the payment of a “four figure sum” by News of the World to a police contact. (Cops hate it when you reveal the source of their donut money.) In 2007, ,chaussures air jordan, the lead police investigator in the phone-hacking case, left the force in the wake of questions about his professional conduct. His destination: a as columnist for Murdoch’s Times of London. Over the summer, Police Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson was forced to when his personal links to a News of the World editor arrested in the hacking investigation were revealed. Assistant Commissioner John Yates, who neglected to reopen the phone-hacking investigation after he reviewed it in 2009, also this summer following assertions that he had mucked up the probe.

How badly did Yates neglect the investigation? Between 2006 and autumn 2010, nobody in Scotland Yard “bothered to sort through” the “11,000 pages of handwritten notes listing nearly 4,000 celebrities,jordan, politicians, sports stars, police officials and crime victims whose phones may have been hacked by the News of the World,” as the New York Times‘ Don Van Natta Jr. in July. Said Yates in defense of his investigative priorities,jordan pas cher, “Im not going to go down and look at bin bags.”

Stephenson, Yates, and Hayman have recently been of misconduct in the case, but it’s a rare police force that doesn’t hassle the press for exposing its transgressions and embarrassments. The best way to grade a news organization is to ask when the government last subpoenaed its reporters. If it’s been longer than two years, the news organization hasn’t been doing its job.

The Guardian provides a perfect example of no good deed going unpunished. The explicit target of the court order is the Guardian journalists, but the unsubtle message to leakers of police misbehavior everywhere is this: Do the right thing and we will smoke you out and send youand your sourcesto jail.

The Guardian‘s Dan Sabbagh an excellent question on Twitter this afternoon: Why didn’t the Met police go after the Telegraph with the Official Secrets Act after it publishedin defiance of Parliamentits 2009 of the misuse of expense budgets by members of Parliament? Sabbagh’s analysis is dead-on: If airing evidence of Parliament’s wrong-doing before the authorities have sanitized it isn’t “impeding” an investigation, nothing is.

This isn’t the first time the police have tried to shut down the Guardian‘s phone-hacking investigation, as it reports today. In December 2009, Commissioner Stephenson triedunsuccessfullyto convince the paper that its coverage of the affair was overblown. But last summer in to the select committee investigating the scandal, he reversed himself and conceded the Guardian had been right to pursue the story.

When police botch a case, as the Metropolitan Police have,jordan pas cher, usually nobody but the press will investigate. When the police go crooked, as bribe-taking members of the Metropolitan Police are believed to have,nike air jordan, you can’t always depend on the internal affairs department to set them straight. Your better bet is an unfettered press. Instead of harassing the Guardian with court orders, the cops should be buying Davies and Hill drinks.

That’s something even former Police Commissioner Stephenson might salute now.

******

By my own yardstick, I am a failed journalist. Never has any police force subpoenaed me. If the Met has any spare court orders, won’t someone please e-mail one of them to . For faster delivery,nike air jordan, send them to my feed. (This rings every time a new Shafer column goes live. This one rings every time a correction is filed.)

PHOTO: A traditional lamp stands outside a Metropolitan Police station in central London February 1, 2011. REUTERS/Luke MacGregor