When people in the center-right in Washington come to agreement on policy, it is almost certainly a really bad idea. The War in Iraq is exhibit A. The current drive to slash Medicare, along with the companion effort against Social Security, falls into the same category.

The story is a simple one: The long-term budget projections paint a scary picture. While the latest baseline numbers from the Congressional Budget Office are relatively benign, the "alternative scenario," which CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf argues is more likely, paints a far darker picture. In this scenario, the deficit would be a whopping 9.8 percent of gross domestic product by 2025.

That might have been a good question for reporters to address when they reported on the February trade data released yesterday. The data showed that royalties and licensing fees had increased by $883 million from January, a rise of more than 40 percent.

This has occasionally happened in prior months and presumably reflects one-time payments to a producer or set of producers. However, this was a big part of the $2.8 billion rise in the overall trade deficit from January and it deserved some mention in the coverage of the February data.

--Dean Baker