Take the Deficit, Please
Tom Daschle wants the mantle of Eisenhower-style fiscal Victorianism. Let him have it.

January 11, 2002 11:20 a.m.

t 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.