The best mass media analyst of our political-economy helps us clear up the fog again, turning down the noise machine in favor of policy debates that focus on job creation.
"Recent events have also demonstrated clearly what was already apparent to careful observers: the deficit-scold movement was never really about the deficit. Instead, it was about using deficit fears to shred the social safety net. And letting that happen wouldn’t just be bad policy; it would be a betrayal of the Americans who just re-elected a health-reformer president and voted in some of the most progressive senators ever....
Contrary to the way it’s often portrayed, the looming prospect of spending cuts and tax increases isn’t a fiscal crisis. It is, instead, a political crisis brought on by the G.O.P.’s attempt to take the economy hostage. And just to be clear, the danger for next year is not that the deficit will be too large but that it will be too small, and hence plunge America back into recession.
Deficit scolds are having a hard time with this issue. How can they warn us not to go over the fiscal cliff without seeming to contradict their own rhetoric about the evils of deficits?
This wouldn’t be hard if they had been making a more honest case on the budget: the truth is that deficits are actually a good thing when the economy is deeply depressed, so deficit reduction should wait until the economy is stronger."
With fewer Tea Party knuckleheads in Congress there is a chance we can return to the less hysterical questions we need to debate about tax policy, deficit spending, and job creation...questions that do not, and never did, have anything to do with a march toward socialism...unless the pre-Bush tax cuts world that was dominated by Reagan and Clinton is to be reconstructed as a socialist nightmare.
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