Going Back To Square One
by digby
Following up on the post below it should be noted that the idea that we need to talk about deficits at all is fairly ridiculous since we are in the middle of an economic slump so terrible that even thinking about anything but getting people back to work is just a distraction. Joshua Hollad makes that point well in this piece on Alternet today.
But the political reality is that the president made the calculation from the beginning of his term that he was going to make some sort of “Grand Bargain” with the Republicans and it has finally come down to this. It’s impossible to know whether or not he knew that by enabling deficit talk he was playing into an existing pernicious theme that the deficit boogeyman was responsible for the anemic economy, but it did. And here we are.
It’s important that people continue to keep perspective on this, but thanks to the president’s insistence on putting this issue on the menu early on, the political dynamic at the moment is such that liberals have to prove that their policies to create security and prosperity will fit this silly frame. And they do — basically create jobs, tax the wealthy at the rates they paid ten years ago and control health care costs et voila. The numbers add up.
Once you do that then we can get down to the real argument which is over whether the government should tax the wealthy and do more to create jobs. They are obscuring that argument with the deficit obsession for a very good reason — they don’t think they can win it. And why would they?
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