One big question looking forward is whether Obama will once again turn to the Beltway-insider deficit hawks for alleged wisdom. Let’s hope not.

For one thing, the election offered confirmation of something that was actually pretty obvious: some of the most self-righteous deficit hawks are actually much more concerned with using deficits as an excuse to dismantle the social safety net than with, you know, reducing deficits. Notably, David Walker decided, a week before the election, to endorse Mitt Romney — even though Romney had proposed a $5 trillion tax cut to be offset by loophole closing he declined to specify, not to mention an increase in defense spending the Pentagon said it didn’t need.

As an aside, Walker’s timing was interesting. If you were following the election quants, you already knew that Obama was a clear favorite to win — 3 to 1 according to Nate Silver, much more than that according to Sam Wang. So why would Walker — whose popular following might include some but not all of his immediate family — throw his support to the likely loser? Probably because he was listening to the wrong people, and actually believed the stuff about Romneymentum.

Yet despite what should have been a major discrediting of the whole deficit-hawk establishment, the word is that Wall Street is pushing for Obama to appoint Erskine Bowles as Treasury Secretary.

Erskine Bowles? The man who, charged with producing a deficit-reduction plan, decided that a key feature of this plan should be … cuts in marginal tax rates on high incomes? The man who warned, in dire terms, of a looming fiscal crisis, with soaring US borrowing costs, within two years — almost two years ago? Just for the record, here’s how it’s going:

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As I said, let’s hope that Obama knows better than to give these people any credence.