Earlier this month, I had the pleasure of meeting Josh Barro, a writer and thinker I’ve admired for some time. As a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, he is working on the fiscal challenges facing governments at all levels in the United States. He is also one of the most fair-minded analysts I’ve come across, who writes with a cant-free clarity I find deeply impressive. I’ve asked him to join me at The Agenda for the next few weeks, a time in which we have every reason to believe that the Obama administration and its congressional allies will pass health reform legislation that will have a profound impact on the American welfare state, for better or for worse.

One of the many reasons I’ve enjoyed Josh’s writing is that he is very much an independent voice for fiscal sustainability, a term you’ll be hearing a lot of from both of us. Judging by most of the coverage of Congress and the state capitals, you’d get the impression that politics is a game. Apocalyptic rhetoric is found on every front: if you oppose our bill, you are indifferent to the death and suffering of others; if this bill passes, the country will go bankrupt, etc. This rhetoric masks the really difficult choices that define public policy. We forget the invisible killers, like slow growth. We forget that the rhetoric of bankruptcy is actually a counsel for inaction, and delaying the difficult but perfectly realistic choices we need to make today to stave off not fiscal doom but fiscal pain that will straiten our horizons.

As a general rule, we opinion journalists cherry-pick our statistics to present a portrait of the world that comports with our own biases. In a sense, this is inevitable. As a friend of mine recently noted, we leave in a world full of puzzles and ambiguities, and facts that beget contradictory facts. Navigating through this environment is exceedingly difficult, and it takes a great deal of discipline to avoid falling into the trap of ideological thinking rather than empirical thinking. But after reading Josh’s work, you’ll see very clearly that he has this particular skill on lock. Rather than serve a partisan agenda, Josh always keeps his eye on the long-term economic interests of the United States as best as he can interpret them.

Basically, we’re taking The Agenda to a new level.