Helpmates

by digby

Chris Hayes has an excellent piece up about the mind-bogglingly silly reporting about the deficit which perfectly expresses my feelings:

The discussion about deficits and debt in Washington is so colossally stupid and disingenuous that even engaging it makes me despair. But today’s Politico so expertly packages together every conceivable Beltway Establishment inanity about “spending” and “deficits” into one glib little piece of analysis that I can’t help myself. (Well, I could help myself but was bullied over Twitter into writing about it here.)

There’s one big maddening conceptual error at the heart of this piece (whether committed in good faith or bad I can’t say) which is to confuse relatively substantial pieces of domestic legislation with a spending “binge.” See, a government, like any organization, institution, or firm has expenditures and revenues. Miraculously, it can increase its expenditures, without increasing its deficit, if it also increases its revenues. This is called “deficit neutral” and it’s what the current health care bill, in all its incarnations, is. It is what the cap and trade bill will also be. read on ….

None of that matters. What matters is that the Villagers believe that Americans must suffer. It isn’t about economics, it’s about some sort of religious sacrifice. They’ve been leading up to this since Obama’s election.

Here’s an example from last January:

MSNBC commentator: … The subtext of all of this [call to service] is “hey Americans, you’re gonna have to do your part too. There may be some sacrifices involved for you too.” Do you think he’s going to use his political capital to make those arguments and will it go beyond rhetoric?

Andrea Mitchell: It does go beyond rhetoric. He needs to engage the American people in this joint venture. That’s part of the call. That’s part of what he needs to accomplish in his speech and in the days following the speech. He needs to make people feel that this is their venture as well and that people are going to need to be more patient and have to contribute and that there will have to be some sacrifice.

And certainly, if he is serious about what he told the Washington Post last week, that he wants to take on entitlement reform, there will be greater sacrifice required from a nation already suffering from economic crisis — to ask people to take a look at their health care and their other entitlements and realize that for the long term health and vitality of the country we’re going to have to give up something that we already enjoy.

Americans aren’t suffering enough, you see. At least according to millionaire television celebrity Andrea Mitchell who will presumably be asked to give up paying higher taxes as her “sacrifice.”

The deficit is the bludgeon used by the wealthy bondholders to beat liberals into retreat on doing anything that might make average citizens feel that democratic government might be a better guarantor of economic security than their rich overlords (who are doing “God’s Work” allegedly on their behalf.)

The press corps and the political establishment are happily doing their bidding and the fact that they are actually blabbering on about the deficit while we have more than 10% unemployment proves that we have gone down the rabbit hole — and they are filling it in behind us.

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