Everyone should read Christopher Hayes’ piece at The Nation. The deficit, he points out, has grown from three economic facts: our two unnecessary wars, thge Bush tax cuts and the recession. End the first and let the second expire and we’re long on the way to addressing the debt and deficit crisi.
That said, Hayes makes it clear that we are working against a dangerous rhetorical tide:
The conversation—if it can be called that—about deficits recalls the national conversation about war in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. From one day to the next, what was once accepted by the establishment as tolerable—Saddam Hussein—became intolerable, a crisis of such pressing urgency that “serious people” were required to present their ideas about how to deal with it. Once the burden of proof shifted from those who favored war to those who opposed it, the argument was lost.
We are poised on the same tipping point with regard to the debt. Amid official unemployment of 9.5 percent and a global contraction, we shouldn’t even be talking about deficits in the short run. Yet these days, entrance into the club of the “serious” requires not a plan for reducing unemployment but a plan to do battle with the invisible and as yet unmaterialized international bond traders preparing an attack on the dollar.
What Hayes is describing is the way of Washington, the way that the conventional wisdom dictates all narratives and pushes inconvenient facts out.
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