Deficit hawks vs. deficit frauds

By Ezra Klein

I wouldn't blame the current spasm of misguided concern about short-term deficits on money that Pete Peterson and others have pumped into the deficit issue. As far as I can tell, Washington's serious deficit hawks have made a real effort to distinguish short-term deficits from long-term deficits. David Walker, perhaps Peterson's most important apostle on this earth, co-wrote a lions-laying-with-lambs op-ed with EPI's Larry Mishel in which they jointly argued that a "focus on jobs now is consistent with addressing our deficit problems ahead."

And Walker isn't alone. The Bipartisan Policy Center's debt-reduction commission paired their deficit plan with a proposal for more short-term stimulus. The idea that we can either focus on jobs now or deficits now is "a false choice," they said. That shamed the Simpson-Bowles Commission into adopting their stimulus proposal.

There are other examples, too, but those should suffice. There has been a genuine campaign on the part of people who are concerned about the economy to explain that the dangers of debt are longer term, while the pain of joblessness is happening right now.

The deficit hawks, however, often get blamed for the actions and rhetoric of the deficit frauds. The deficit frauds are the folks who use deficits for short-term political gain: This year, they've mainly been Republicans who opposed unemployment benefits because they'd add $56 billion to the deficit but demanded tax cuts that would add $4 trillion to the deficit. And they've been empowered not by Peterson's money or even the climate in Washington, but by the fact that people get very anxious about the deficit when the economy slows, as it's a number that they think helps explain the economic problems even as it mainly tracks them, and because a misplaced analogy to the European debt crises has made our deficit look scarier than it actually is.