Forget Jumping the Shark? The WaPo is Doing the Tango with It

UPDATE: Jason Linkins at one of the non-Breast-Enhanced sites of the Huffington Post did a burlesque of which I can only dream on the same piece.

Via Chris Hayes’s Twitter feed (and he got it from David Sirota), the following is from “No more ‘me first’ mentality on entitlements“:

While it does not happen often, our political system is capable of making unpopular decisions that are in our collective best interest. In 2008, during the most severe financial crisis in 80 years, Republican and Democratic leaders in Washington came together to do something deeply unpopular: bail out the financial system via the Troubled Assets Relief Program. These leaders understood the consequence of inaction was economic devastation for Americans. Passing TARP was the right thing to do.

[B]ailing out the financial system went directly against our shared beliefs in free markets and fair play. While the vast majority of Americans did not cause the financial crisis, we all had to sacrifice to stop it. Such a cultural violation has angered people nationwide, which makes cutting entitlements more difficult because it will again betray our sense of fairness.

The challenge of entitlements is more difficult than the financial crisis: First, we must reach consensus to make cuts before the fiscal crisis is upon us….If we wait until the bond market shuns Treasurys, the economic consequences could be dire. Virtually overnight, we could have far less money to spend on priorities such as defense, education and research.

Cutting entitlement spending requires us to think beyond what is in our own immediate self-interest. But it also runs against our sense of fairness: We have, after all, paid for entitlements for earlier generations. Is it now fair to cut my benefits? No, it isn’t. But if we don’t focus on our collective good, all of us will suffer.

I’ve resequenced the above paragraphs a bit, but remained faithful to the argument as presented.

The author: Neel Kashkari, who is described as “a managing director of the investment management firm PIMCO, served as an assistant Treasury secretary during the George W. Bush administration. He led the Office of Financial Stability and ran the Troubled Assets Relief Program until May 2009.”

His sacrifices for the sake of TARP are well known; indeed, documented in the paragraph above. And, gosh, isn’t it nice that he pushes an argument that would make fixed-rate securities—you know, the thing PIMCO is famous for trading—more valuable?

It’s good to know that “Me First” needs to change, and nice to see the Post presenting a prime example of why.