Ryan Cooper writes about possibilities for a deal that actually does something to boost the economy. He suggests that with the deficit obsession fading, Democrats can go back to the old formula of spending increases in return for tax cuts — the formula that gave us, for example, the Children’s Health Insurance Program in the late 1990s.

I don’t buy it, basically because I believe you need to play the political economy long game. Starve the beast is still out there as a strategy; conservatives still push tax cuts in part because they expect, probably rightly, that this will tilt the balance toward cuts in the safety net the next time the deficit becomes a big issue. Don’t you think federal spending would be significantly higher now if the Bush tax cuts had never been passed?

But Cooper in passing reminds me of something I wrote during the depths of oh-my-God-90-percent-debt enthusiasm. As Cooper suggests, way back then I made all the key anti-debt-panic arguments that would be vindicated in 2013 — which is not so much a comment on my own perspicacity as it is a comment on how easy it was to see the flaws in the debt-panic argument right from the beginning, never mind the spreadsheet.

And following the link from my post to the article that inspired it, I see a reminder of what was really going on before the debt scolds tried to rewrite history. These days, they always insist that they weren’t arguing for short-run fiscal austerity. Oh yes they were: in the linked article, Ken Rogoff explicitly attacks those who wanted to maintain fiscal stimulus, and ridicules those suggesting that pursuing fiscal consolidation “risks throwing already weak economies into double-dip recessions, or even a sustained depression.”

Um, Europe?

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The point is that it was or should have been obvious way back in 2010 both that debt panic was unjustified and that it was helping to rationalize policies that would be very destructive.