Reporters & Analysts Unfairly Treating Blunt's 'Jobs Plan' As If It Were A Serious Proposal

First, the Kansas City Star decided to actually read Roy Blunt's job proposal and ask his candidate to substantiate the information presented in said proposal.  Blunt and surrogate Sarah Steelman told reporters yesterday that they were "extremely worried about the deficit" and had allegedly identified $2 trillion in spending reductions.  But as you can read over on the Prime Buzz, half of those "savings" come from the federal health care reform bill, which actually decreases the federal deficit over time by reducing waste in Medicare and raising additional taxes and fees.  

Cancelling health care reform may or may not be good public policy, but it would have little impact on the federal deficit — certainly nowhere near the $1 trillion Blunt and Steelman claim.

And then some weirdo at Think Progress decided to look at the other proposals in Blunt's 'jobs plan.'

[T]he point remains that the only way Blunt’s push for repeal works as a deficit reduction measure is if he plans to keep all of the tax increases and Medicare savings, without actually giving anyone any additional health care.

Plenty of other spending cuts that Blunt suggests are equally ill-informed. He proposes repealing the remaining stimulus funds, including those dedicated to middle class tax cuts. He also says he’d cut an unidentified “wasteful welfare program,” which is presumably the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Emergency Fund that House Republicans like to cite all the time. But it’s actually a successful work program that is supporting hundreds of thousands of jobs across the country, including 4,600 in Blunt’s own state.

Ridiculous, right?

Why are people actually reading and evaluating this proposal at all?   I'm quite confident that we were all supposed to congratulate Mr. Blunt for having something approximating a "plan" without actually evaluating its contents or asking questions about the ideas contained within its pages. 

This fact-checking and policy analysis sounds exactly like something socialists and terrorists and hippies would do.