Reason Editor suggests his own magazine is lying

By Glenn Greenwald
Salon.com

"The Congressional Budget Office now reports that this bill will reduce our deficit by $132 billion over the first decade, and by as much as $1.3 trillion in the decade after that" -- Barack Obama, Tuesday.

"Obama's Latest Health Care Lie: There are actually multiple lies and deceptions in [Obama's] paragraph, beginning with the verb 'reports' to describe what the Congressional Budget Office does. The CBO, as Peter Suderman documented in his foundational Reason feature on the organization, does not 'report,' it 'projects,' in highly speculative fashion, what a proposed piece of legislation may cost" -- Matt Welch, Editor-in-Chief, Reason, yesterday, writing next to a photo of Obama with a Pinocchio nose.

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So according to Welch, Obama "lied" because he used the word "report" to describe what the CBO does and because he suggested the CBO's projections are reliable. What, then, does that say about numerous Reason editors and writers, who wrote the following back when Reason loved the CBO because it was reporting that Obama's health care proposal and other policies would increase the deficit? Using Welch's "reasoning," it must mean that Reason's staff is filled with outright liars:

Reason Editor Peter Suderman, July 10, 2009: "I won't dispute that Medicare is popular, or that politicians -- even Republicans -- don't usually criticize it, but it hasn't exactly been an unqualified success. On the contrary, as the CBO reports, the program's fiscal future looks dire."

(Continued here.)