My friend Ezra Klein — the hardest-working policy blogger in the business, who makes my job much, much easier than it would be in his absence — writes the following:

Reihan Salam is a friend of mine and a very smart guy, but he has an odd habit of substituting positions he likes for positions that are operative in the American political debate. There’s something to that: It’s important to respond to strong positions even if they’re not being advocated by either political party. But it’s also important to respond to the positions being advocated by actual politicians when you’re talking about votes they may or may not make.

As a general rule, I think my job is holding powerful people accountable. This is the reason why I spent a lot of time criticizing the Bush White House and it is why I spend a lot of time criticizing the Obama White House. When I see broad generalizations about austerity-advocates — the term “austerity-advocates” strikes me as too broad, but we’ll put that to the side — it worries me, because, like Ezra, I’d like strong positions to get the attention they deserve.

But I wanted to highlight another small point. I often draw attention to Jeffrey Sachs’s call for balancing the budget over the business cycle, one reason why he’s been critical of the Administration’s approach to fiscal stimulus. I’m always careful to note that Sachs is also well to my left, and that he’s far more comfortable with, for example, sharp increases in marginal tax rates than I am. Ezra offers a characterization of Sachs’s views that I find very useful:

As for Sachs, I doubt that the austerity-advocates would find much truck with his views. He’s for debt reduction, yes, but he wants to see it in the context of a transformation into Switzerland. His specific recommendations are “income support for the poor, universal access to basic healthcare and education, a scaling up of job training programmes and promotion of higher education”; massive public investment in “good education, cutting-edge technology, reliable infrastructure”; and tax reform such that “the rich pay more in income and wealth taxes – indeed, a lot more.” He also says that “fighting for market credibility via draconian cuts in spending … is the wrong approach.” At another point in the column, Sachs says he would’ve been fine with a massive stimulus that had been focused on green jobs, “in which the fall in consumer spending would be offset by investments in sustainable energy.”

I’d dispute that last observation. I don’t think he “would’ve been fine with a massive stimulus that had been focused on green jobs.” Sachs’s use of the term “offset” is easy to interpret that way, but massive spending would in tension with his broader case against extreme swings in macroeconomic policy. My impression is that Sachs was talking about a long-term project of transforming the U.S. economy, one that would involve raising revenue through a variety of strategies. Again, I don’t share Sachs’s enthusiasm for large-scale green industrial policy, but this is a serious argument.

I’d also add that what you might call the Chicago view of stimulus is that a depressed economy could mean that we can purchase valuable assets at a discount: this is one way of viewing infrastructure spending. The trouble is determining which investments are truly valuable or not. The case for a stimulus driven by a large Investment Tax Credit is that private firms are better at identifying cost-effective, valuable investments. We’ve managed to conflate a lot of different ideas under the umbrella of stimulus, some of them good and some of them bad. I think it’s important to maintain distinctions.

But I certainly like the idea of making the U.S. more like Switzerland. As Ezra’s colleague Dylan Matthews, a terrific blogger in his own right, reports in a handy chart, Switzerland is one of the OECD countries that spend far less on government at all levels than the United States. And in 2008, Switzerland also generated a healthy surplus. It’s true that Switzerland has a modest wealth tax. Overall, though, the Swiss are very lightly taxed by international standards. The Swiss government, at the confederation and cantonal levels, tends to do a better job of efficiently delivering public services than we do. Part of that, I’d submit, reflects the strength of Tiebout choice in a highly decentralized society and the fiscal discipline imposed by small-scale, participatory local governments.

As for Scott Brown and John Boehner, and Nancy Pelosi and Dick Durbin, I guess I don’t weigh their public statements very heavily. Sure, I’m pleased when Boehner says reasonably smart things about reforming Social Security. But I’m more interested in what Hill staffers and White House staffers think and where they’re getting their intellectual ammunition. I’m also interesting in learning from others engaged in these conversations and making a small contribution to how a small handful of engaged citizens think about important public policy questions. That often means less simplifying and more “complexifying.”

Admittedly, this might make for a less entertaining blog …