Ed Kilgore is deeply annoyed, as he should be, at the “No Labels” people promulgating the notion that all we need to do to solve our problems is transcend our petty partisanship. As he points out, even their diagnosis of what our problems are — specifically, that budget uncertainty is keeping our economy depressed — is something that, as it happens, neither Democrats nor Republicans accept.

But Kilgore goes too easy on these guys. It’s not just that partisans of all stripes would disagree with their diagnosis; there is not a shred of evidence supporting their claims. Where is the evidence that fear of future deficits — as opposed to fear of political chaos over the debt ceiling and all that — is depressing business spending? Where, indeed, is the evidence that out there in the real world of economic decision-making, long-term deficits worry anyone at all? How do you reconcile claims that it’s all about the fiscal outlook with record-low borrowing costs?

The truth is that this is all a self-indulgent fantasy. Very Serious People love to pontificate about the budget, because it makes them sound, well, Very Serious; and so naturally they really like a doctrine which makes everything going wrong a byproduct of the political system’s failure to heed their Very Serious advice. But there is, as I said, no evidence to support that comforting belief, and in fact all the evidence points instead to a Keynesian story about inadequate demand.

What leads to this self-indulgence? In large part it is what Jon Chait calls the “repetitive drone of elite sentiment”, in which the usual suspects pat each other and themselves on the back, with never a skeptical question. Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson will not appear on a Sunday talk show and get asked why the fiscal crisis they keep predicting hasn’t materialized. David Walker won’t be asked why, if the great danger is that at some point in the future we may be forced to cut benefits, it’s so important that we commit now to … cutting future benefits.

In ordinary life, believing what makes you feel comfortable, never mind reality, is widely understood to be a failing. In the world of Very Serious pontification, the practice is so deeply embedded that people don’t even know that they’re doing it.