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last, freedom. For years, the GOP has been the party of anti-deficit
obsessives.
It's why Republicans
almost lost the House after 1994, as they ignored every sensible
political impulse and pushed for reductions in Medicare spending
in a headlong crusade to balance the books. And so Bill Clinton
got the priceless opportunity for his 1995-96 comeback.
It's why many
Republicans, led by a certain Arizona senator, wanted to eschew
tax cuts in recent years and opt for debt reduction instead.
But now, a
new wind blows in from South Dakota. Tom Daschle wants the mantle
of Eisenhower-style fiscal Victorianism. Please, please let him
have it.
Let Tom Daschle
explain why he wants to reverse popular tax cuts and cut defense
and domestic spending to prevent a deficit over the next 10 years.
Let The
New Republic's Jonathan Chait explain why the tax cut is really,
really, really responsible for our fiscal ruin.
Let Paul Krugman
write column inch after column inch agonizing over numbers in the
"out years."
In short, let
the Democratic party and its allied scribblers hoist the deficit
as an issue around their necks and stumble under its weight from
person to person forevermore, repeating their strange tale of fiscal
woe.
In the period
roughly from 1992-94 the deficit, thanks to Ross Perot, had achieved
real salience as a political issue. It had become a symbol of governmental
incontinence, and as such, Republicans were able to ride it to their
grand 1994 sweep.
Anti-deficit
crusading will always have some appeal to the bedrock fiscal moralism
of Middle America (deficits and debt just sound wrong to
many Americans).
But the deficit,
at bottom, is a process issue, which is why congressional Republicans
in 1995-96 were pitting an issue people really cared about —
Medicare — against one they really didn't — the deficit.
It will have
no effect on anyone's life whether we run a deficit or surplus this
year or the next or the one after that. The fodder for much of the
budget debate — CBO and OMB estimates — has little bearing
even on bookkeeping reality, let alone anything anyone should truly
care about.
What matters
is whether the economy is healthy and whether we win the war. As
many writers on NRO have demonstrated, the deficit has no effect
on the former, and it certainly has nothing to do with the latter.
So, Washington
should take whatever measures are necessary to stimulate the economy
and win the war, and let the balance sheets fend for themselves.
The deficit
won't soon become a super-charged issue again as it was circa 1994,
because most people understand a war and a recession are pretty
good excuses for deficit spending.
So, if you
want to gauge the current appeal of deficit talk don't think Ross
Perot, think Walter Mondale, who flailed away at a popular (Cold)
war president about the deficit to no effect whatsoever.
The other problem
for Daschle is that even as deficit hawks go, he won't make a very
good one. His speech last weekend oozed insincerity.
If he cares
so much about fiscal responsibility, why not try in earnest to repeal
the tax cuts and while he's at it give up Democratic spending priorities
just to keep all the federal ink good and black?
Everyone knows
what's going on here. Democrats love to talk up the deficit as a
way to block tax cuts; Republicans love it as a way to block Democratic
spending.
It would be
much better to have an honest and principled argument over the merits
of these various proposals rather than all the make-believe about
deficits. But if one party wants to make-believe harder and talk
more about budget arcana and austerity than the other, better that
it be the Democrats.
Go, Tom, go.
Apology
Thanks
to sloppy note taking,
I misrepresented a Spence Abraham quote in yesterday's piece.
Abraham did insist that all of us are hyphenated Americans, but
went on to say "it's that second word, American, that is the
most important of all." My apologies.
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