Here's the lede from today's Washington Post article about President Obama's budget:

The $3.8 trillion budget blueprint President Obama is submitting to Congress on Monday calls for billions of dollars in new spending to combat persistently high unemployment and bolster a battered middle class. But it also would slash funding for hundreds of programs and raise taxes on banks and the wealthy to help rein in soaring budget deficits.

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To reduce deficits, he would impose new fees on some of the nation's largest banks and permit a range of tax cuts to expire for families earning more than $250,000 a year, in addition to freezing non-security spending for three years.

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The budget includes $1.4 trillion in new taxes over the next decade, including the expiration of Bush administration tax breaks that benefit families making more than $250,000 a year.

Not once does the Post indicate that the “new taxes” and “raise[d] taxes” in the form of the expiration of the Bush tax breaks for families earning more than $250,000 a year are exactly what are provided for under current law -- a built-in feature of Bush's tax cut package. Portraying the decision to allow tax cuts to expire as scheduled as a tax increase -- or, worse, “new taxes” -- fundamentally skews tax policy debates in favor of conservatives, as I explained last year:

What makes all of this even more absurd is that the increase in the top tax rates probably shouldn't be considered a tax hike in the first place. Obama's tax rate proposal merely allows the Bush tax cuts to expire as they were designed. See, when the Republican Congress passed, and President Bush signed, the tax cuts in 2001, they decided not to make them permanent, scheduling them to expire in 2010. Obama's proposal simply allows that to happen for the top rates -- it makes no change to what is already going to happen under current law.

If the expiration, on schedule, of tax cuts that were always scheduled to expire is described as a policy of raising taxes, that makes a mockery of the entire tax policy debate of the past decade. It rigs tax debates in favor of Republicans, who find it easier to argue for tax cuts for the wealthy if they can argue that the cuts won't cost very much -- by making them “temporary” -- but who then get to argue that the scheduled expiration that they included in order to make the cuts look affordable would constitute a tax increase. The GOP gets to have it both ways, describing tax cuts as temporary when it helps them, and pretending they were intended to be permanent when it helps them. It's no great surprise Republicans want to have it both ways -- but that doesn't mean the media should go along.

Later in today's Washington Post article:

The new budget projects that the deficit will increase by $8.5 trillion over the next decade, a slight improvement over the $9 trillion, 10-year increase that the White House projected in August. Still, the deficit spending would drive borrowing from private sources to more than 68 percent of the economy by the end of next year, and to 77 percent of the economy by 2020.

I doubt many people flinched at the phrase “deficit spending” -- it has been a common element of news reports about the budget for years. But when was the last time you saw the phrase “deficit tax-cutting” in a news report? You have probably never seen it. It should be obvious that when the media employs a derisive short-hand phrase to describe spending during a time of deficits, but does not do so for tax cuts, that has a distorting effect on the public discourse.

Indeed, the Post carries the Republicans water, making their attacks on spending for them:

But Republicans are more likely to highlight the fact that a jobs bill would drive this year's budget deficit even higher than the record $1.4 trillion recorded in 2009.

Incredibly, the Post goes on to quote Republicans denouncing Obama's “fiscal discipline” and calling for further tax cuts -- without once indicating that those tax cuts would be “deficit tax cuts,” or noting that they would open Republicans up to criticism for policies that would increase the deficit. The Washington Post apparently thinks only Democrats can be criticized for increasing the deficit -- and only through spending, not tax cuts.