Budget Non-Sequiturs
24 Nov 2009 04:19 pm
Posting about our coming entitlement problem generates some non-sequiturs masquerading as incisive political commentary.
* Conservatives have "no credibility" on budget deficits because George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan ran big deficits You are missing a Republican president in the middle: George H. W. Bush, who bravely enacted a whopping tax hike in order to close the deficit, helping to ensure that he would not be re-elected in 1992; by most metrics, Bush I deserves about as much credit for closing the deficit as Clinton does. But even if this weren't a highly selective misreading of history, so what? Are we going to drive our government over a fiscal cliff because George Bush and the Republicans who enabled them were grossly irresponsible, and some of the commentators were hypocrites? That'll show 'em!!!
* You can't talk about deficits in regard to health care spending because the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were really expensive. Item: wars, and stimulus spending, are the kind of thing that are traditionally done on deficit spending, all the way back to the American revolution. That's because they're temporary, and it often makes sense to amortize the cost over a number of years. Item #2: Lumping in Afghanistan, when almost everyone in the country supported that, is pretty silly. Item #3: Entitlements are not supposed to be funded on deficit spending, because they're not temporary. It's the same reason that it's okay to take out some student loans to pay for medical school, and not okay to take out a home equity loan to pay your mortgage. You can say that we should never have gone into Iraq, and I'll agree; it's entirely possible that we should stop spending money there, and in Afghanistan, ASAP. But the problem with our entitlements is not their ten year cost; it's that their costs keep growing and growing.
* The deficit can't be that big, because Iraq and Afghanistan are costing $600 billion and counting Umm . . . what? You're comparing a ten year cost to a one year deficit of $700+ billion.
* Every other industrialized country has a national health care system Which will fix our structural budget deficit how, exactly?
meganmcardle.theatlantic.com
Holdfast November 24, 2009 6:23 PM
I used to think that Reagan and W ran big deficits, but now I have learned that they were mere pikers. But seriously, we'll give W partial credit for the FY 2009 deficit blowout, at least for everything before Jan 20 (I seem to recall the Dems retaking Congress in 2006, and I think that budgets actually originate in Congress, no?), but the Porkulus is all on Obama - sure he outsourced it to Nancy and Harry, but that was his decision. The problem isn't 2009 or even 2010 - we really did experience a huge fiscal and financial crisis that resulted in unexpected expenses and a huge drop in revenues - the problem is that the picture does not look to get any better in the future. And instead of addressing that, Obama, Reid and Pelosi are determined to ram through a program that will permanently explode the already staggering deficit. It would by hilarious if it weren't so frightening.
meganmcardle.theatlantic.com |
