Over the past few weeks, there has been a remarkable change of position among the deficit scolds who have dominated economic policy debate for more than three years. It’s as if someone sent out a memo saying that the Chicken Little act, with its repeated warnings of a U.S. debt crisis that keeps not happening, has outlived its usefulness. Suddenly, the argument has changed: It’s not about the crisis next month; it’s about the long run, about not cheating our children. The deficit, we’re told, is really a moral issue. ...Paul Krugman, NYT
Not an economic issue. Of course, there's a certain irony to watching Republicans embracing morality. Morality hasn't played a role in the Republican party for... oh god, for how many years?! The substitute -- chemically-induced religiosity -- isn't even a third cousin of morality.
And how can they walk away from their roles as deficit scolds without explanation?
What happened? Basically, the numbers refuse to cooperate: Interest rates remain stubbornly low, deficits are declining and even 10-year budget projections basically show a stable fiscal outlook rather than exploding debt.
So talk of a fiscal crisis has subsided. ...Krugman, NYT
What about the war on "entitlements"? Aha! That's where the "morality" turns up now. According to Republicans, it's immoral to help those oldsters. Those people who get social security and medicare are "cheating our children." Never mind that those people gave birth to the children and worked their entire lives contributing to funds to help those children in old age.
Aside from that gross misunderstanding of the system, Republicans don't even understand who owes what to whom in the deficit. Here's how it works:
... Debt doesn’t directly make our nation poorer; it’s essentially money we owe to ourselves. Deficits would indirectly be making us poorer if they were either leading to big trade deficits, increasing our overseas borrowing, or crowding out investment, reducing future productive capacity. But they aren’t: Trade deficits are down, not up, while business investment has actually recovered fairly strongly from the slump. And the main reason businesses aren’t investing more is inadequate demand. They’re sitting on lots of cash, despite soaring profits, because there’s no reason to expand capacity when you aren’t selling enough to use the capacity you have. In fact, you can think of deficits mainly as a way to put some of that idle cash to use. ...Krugman, NYT
In fact, it's Republican policy that is really costing our children. Everytime we hold up funds for regular repairs to the infrastructure -- which is what Republicans have been doing for years -- we're in the process of handing a broken infrastructure over to the kids. Nice! Not to mention cuts in education -- teachers laid off, college subsidies ended.
Strange form of "morality" coming from people who, as a large percentage of the nation has come to realize, are neither competent nor moral representatives of the rest of us.
