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Policies have real effects and a given policy might be expected to do more good (or harm) to the economy than the alternatives. Possibly, it might even be said that one party’s policies, taken together, are superior to the others’. But it is all at the margin. The economy will survive, whoever is elected, and will look much the same four years from now under any party — the same, that is, as it would under another party. Events, especially in the world economy, will have much more impact on our economic fortunes than anything any of the parties have in mind.

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Indeed, for all their emphasis on the things on which they disagree, there is much more on which the parties are agreed. This is perhaps best expressed in the negative: by the things that none of the party leaders will say in the debate, beginning with the above — that the economy doesn’t much care who is in power.

The government doesn’t actually “run” the economy, at least in the way that people in politics like to pretend. Governments have little ability to influence the rate of economic growth in the short run, at least in the positive sense: though they can certainly screw it up, notably by letting inflation get out of hand. It is achievement enough for any government that it avoids doing so. But I doubt you will hear any of the leaders say, “If elected, I promise not to screw things up.”

Likewise, you are unlikely to hear any of the leaders say that it doesn’t matter whether we run a deficit, at least of the kind that any of them are talking about. It doesn’t matter in a negative sense — a $10-billion deficit would scarcely be detectable against the continuing decline of the debt-to-gross domestic product ratio — and it doesn’t matter in a positive sense: whatever miracles might be claimed on behalf of “fiscal stimulus,” a deficit of one-half of one per cent of GDP is not going to work them.