Shocker - HuffPo Writer Has No Integrity

Ryan Grim at the Huffington Post started what appears to be an avalanche of liberal outrage around the blogosphere over the weekend when, on Friday night, he decided he'd write an "article" that "exposes" the Congressional Budget Office's report on the stimulus bill as a complete fake.

Apparently we are supposed to take his accusation at face value, despite the fact that we can read and understand immediately that he has absolutely no clue what he's talking about. Grim writes of the CBO's report:

Because it dealt with just a part of the stimulus, it estimated the spending rate for only about $300 billion of the $825 billion plan. Significant changes have been made to the part of the bill the CBO looked at.

The CBO numbers were given to a small number of congressional Democrats and Republicans, but were not posted online because they're not an official CBO product. (Media outlets, while reporting widely about the "report," have declined to post it online. Here's the whole thing.) Democratic aides say they are certain that the GOP leaked it to the Associated Press in order to undercut the spending portion of the stimulus.

One hopes the reader would recognize the hypocrisy of starting an article by saying the report doesn't exist, and then actually providing the report. However, like Doc Holliday in Tombstone, liberal hypocrisy knows no bounds.

Grim would have us believe that the CBO's analysis is woefully short of the full amount of the stimulus. For anybody that's been paying attention however, that "only about $300 billion" he talks about, is pretty much all of the actual spending that would be going into the economy. I broke this down previously here. There's $360 billion in spending to "inject" into the economy, and ten percent of that is government salaries to implement the programs. So there's your "about $300 billion" in spending that was correctly analyzed by the CBO.

Since Grim didn't bother to look up the initial report that the CBO did when Congress began mulling over the Economic Recovery Act, I went ahead and took the 30 seconds to do it myself. Wouldn't you know it, here's the report he says doesn't exist, or at least attempts to discredit as bad information.

It's not a report on exactly what the stimulus bill is now, since it was a cost analysis done in the infancy of the bill, and Congress has subsequently shuffled parts and pieces around and added more wasteful provisions.

Nonetheless the report exists. It is not a lie spun by Republicans to railroad the stimulus bill.

The CBO's analysis of how long the spending money will take to make it into the economy isn't going to change just because the amounts may have changed slightly.

Facts are facts, and you can't misrepresent them forever.

But obviously that doesn't stop the Huffington Post from publishing whatever tears down Republicans, even when they're proving to be arguing what is right for the country.