CNBC seems to have a pretty bare cupboard of guests these days. This morning they again featured the truth-challenged Steve Rattner. Ethically-challenged, too, it appears.
This morning, the network wanted someone to do a beat-down on Paul Ryan's budget proposals. So they logically turned to a former Obama administration czar. One who never saw government power he wasn't happy to use to coerce investors, rather than adhere to Constitutionally-enshrined bankruptcy processes.
What's rather strange is that the Squawkbox producers would have Rattner, who doesn't have a long career background in federal budgetary matters, appear solely to comment on Ryan's budget.
Rattner duitfully trashed the House GOP member's proposals, solemnly declaring that Americans weren't ready for, didn't want, Medicare to become a voucher program. That they want their promised benefits as is.
As I discussed in today's post on my companion political blog, it's not so clear-cut. Having given Americans an unsustainable, unaffordable benefit for nearly 50 years, Democrats now cry foul when Republicans- or anyone, for that matter, including independents, Tea Partiers, whomever- point out that the choice being framed between realization of this unsustainability and unaffordability or bankrupting the country, is an inconvenient truth.
Despite Rattner's claim to political neutrality, by no longer making campaign contributions, his very position on Medicare paints him as one of those who chooses to be blind to reality.
Of course, his next statements were predictable. Taxes have to rise. No question- in order to fulfill unwise promises made by dim-witted politicians in the late 1960s, in an era of feel-good American economic hegemony, the rich must be sheared.
Too bad an ostensible business network has to engage in such partisan politics, and attempt to disguise such antics as objective punditry.
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