Bush comes into office with a balanced budget and a recession, passes a really big tax cut that brings us into deficits, they applaud. Passes an expensive an inefficient medicare expansion, they're silent.
Obama comes into office with a trillion dollar deficit and a near-depression on his hands, passes tax cuts and a stimulus bill while attacking healthcare costs, and he's "presiding over a spending problem". Nevermind that he's been cutting discretionary spending since 2010.
It's not that their biases don't align with mine -- it's that their biases are so transparently hacky that it destroys any credibility the rest of the magazine has.
BTW, Obama isn't attacking healthcare costs, he's expanding coverage. The cost part comes next.
The CBO graded obamacare as reducing medicare costs (the biggest driver of our budget deficits). Expanding coverage should have a positive impact on costs, too. But I agree that expanding coverage was at least as important the bill's authors.
I wasn't trying to oversimplify the situation more than is necessary for a few sentence summary -- and people could disagree with my characterization. The coverage towards each president from the Economist is enlightening though, especially when you divorce it from policy or compare their coverage of similar policies from both administrations. That's where the hackiness comes in.
Keep an eye out on the cost when the ACA fully rolls out. I'm in the industry and it's not turning out the way people predicted.
- Endless war-mongering. They pushed heavily for the disastrous war in Iraq. After the Boston bombing, they asked whether America was getting complacent. They post a lot of stuff implying that America should go to war in Syria.
- Their coverage of American presidential politics is horrible. In 2000, they endorsed George W Bush, a political scion who was clearly an anti-intellectual and bit of a fool, over Al Gore, a visionary vice president who had co-presided over the longest economic expansion in American history. In 2004, after 4 disastrous years, their "endorsement" issue was titled "Incompetent vs Incoherent".
This stuff, especially the war-mongering, has made me care a lot less about the Economist than I did when I was, say, 18. Given that SV is a very forward-looking place, it is unsurprising that the Economist is less respected than it is in many other locales.