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Recession LedgerThe long downturn, dated and checked

Subject

Government and media

Deficits, debt, and how the news about them is made.

The politics of the downturn: the national debt by presidency, the fortunes made in the pandemic, the wars argued for in leaked memos, and the week the phrase “fake news” changed hands. These are the pages on which the original arguments were most partisan, and they are kept with that register and without its excesses.

Where a claim was later tested by an inquiry or a court, the later note says what it found.

A stack of folded newspapers

2026

  1. The Recovery Act, line by line

    The Recovery Act was sold as one number. The statute is a long list of smaller ones, and the big number itself did not stay put.

2021

  1. The tax-and-vaccinate plan may be the straw that breaks the camel's back: shortages, ports and stagflation in September 2021

    Millions who left the workforce in the lockdown had not come back. The policy response was to remove more.

2020

  1. The coronacrisis turns the buyback billionaires into the trillion-dollar dozen

    Congress said no bailout money could go to buybacks. It did not say no buybacks. Money is fungible, and the companies knew it.

2017

  1. More fake news: how honest photographs were used to shrink an inauguration crowd

    Sometimes it is not the lie you tell but the truth you select.

  2. Fake news: the establishment media devours itself over the dossier

    CNN did not publish the dossier. It published the directions to it, and then argued for a week that the two were different.

2016

  1. Wikileaks and Syria: what the Clinton email archive said about Libya, Iran and Israel

    Neither document mentions ISIS. Both mention Israel and Iran. That is the whole of the argument, and it should be read as exactly that much.

2012

  1. Deficits, debts and Democrats versus Republicans: the US national debt by year and by president

    Conventional wisdom says Republicans run the economy better. Two long series, one on income and one on debt, say something less comfortable for both parties.