They’re educating the voters after all. They’re just teaching them the wrong thing.
by digby
David Dayen makes a very good point, which I missed: during the Hofstra debate, in which questions were posed by members of the public rather than the Beltway elite, there wasn’t a single question about the deficit. Not one. The public really doesn’t care.
And you know what? Neither do financial markets, which continue to lend to the U.S. government at incredibly low rates.
Meanwhile, the results from austerity are in — and it’s now clear that the adverse economic impacts of austerity in a depressed economy are much worse than the elite imagined (although Keynesian economists knew better), and are in fact so severe that austerity is largely self-defeating, having little impact on the budget deficit even in the short run because reduced revenue takes away much of the initial savings. Once you take long-run effects into account, austerity is almost surely self-defeating.
I hadn’t noticed they didn’t ask about it either. But perhaps I can be forgiven for that because it came up so often anyway:
Neither candidate was asked a question about the deficit at the second presidential debate, but the two said the word “deficit” a total of 18 times combined. And they have discussed it continually throughout the campaign.
This is the opposite of pandering. It is politicians preparing their constituents for what they are going to do, regardless of their wishes. Or to be more charitable, it is “educating” them about an issue they don’t care about but which the politicians believe they should.
I have long argued that educating the public is part of their job so I can’t complain about that. But, naturally I’d hoped that the leftward politicians would use their platforms to persuade the people to support policies that are in their self-interest not the interest of the 1%. So it’s fairly astonishing — and depressing — that this is the only issue on which they have bipartisan agreement and are only arguing about the details. An issue which is neither a voter priority or a genuine problem that must be solved immediately and at the expense of the citizens’ already stretched and insecure personal finances. (See: Krugman, above.)
There are differences between the parties and those differences will guide the reasoning and tribal identifications of the voters next month. Sadly for all of us, the obsession with the deficit is not one of them.
.