I don’t think Slate’s “Moneybox” columnist, Daniel Gross, is a fool or a knave. But it seems to me that his most recent column, in which he argues against relying on tax cuts for economic stimulus, is a pretty good example of being hobbled by ideology. Tax cuts won’t work, he argues, because non-posh people are under financial stress and insecure about their positions. So they won’t spend the money, but will put it in banks. He writes:

So, what happens if you cut this worker’s payroll taxes (assuming she’s on somebody’s payroll and isn’t a contractor or self-employed)? Well, she might spend the increased cash flow. But given everything that’s going on, a fearful but still rational person might not rush out to spend or invest the money. She might be far more likely—and well-advised—to save it, to build up a cash hoard that would allow her to remain solvent should she lose her job, or to prepare for the eventuality that she might have to buy her own health insurance. Or she might start shoveling that extra $100 per week into her 401(k) to make up for some of the huge losses she’s suffered.

Having people spend more money on consumer products isn’t the only, or probably even the best, way to stimulate the economy, I’d think. If Americans started packing away lots more money in savings accounts or IRAs, that would be a pretty happy thing: The best way to bolster the banks is presumably through the familiar mechanism of having people deposit money in them. Having Americans’ savings rate go up wouldn’t be bad, either. And money deposited in savings accounts doesn’t just sit there gathering dust; it’s available for things like business loans and mortgages–it becomes capital, the stuff that makes the economy work. Money put into banks may not hit the economy as hard or as fast as money spent at Macy’s (although it’s not obvious that this must be true) but it will almost be put to use more quickly–and more productively–than money appropriated for federal projects of the familiar indoor-rainforest-in-Iowa variety. Even if we’re generous and assume that a good half of the stimulus spending will not go for politically driven boondoggles, it’ll still take a lot of time for those projects to move, and even the good projects will be accompanied by the inevitable fraud, waste, and inefficiency of government work. All of which makes the specter of a higher savings rate that much less terrifying.

Cutting taxes and having Americans save (which is to say, invest) that extra money looks pretty close to a best-case outcome, unless you have a hostility to tax-rate cuts as such. It doesn’t seem to me like Gross’s argument is persuasive at all without a prior ideological orientation toward tax-cut skepticism. And it seems to me that the fact that neither Gross nor his editors feel it at all necessary to address the question suggests an ideological uniformity that does not speak well of them.