Last week, CBS's poll found that no one cares about the deficit, not even Republicans:
Steve Benen observed that there's nothing terribly new about this:
The track record here is pretty consistent -- Reagan was the father of the modern deficit, and no one cared. When Mondale tried to make deficit reduction central to his '84 campaign, he lost 49 states. Clinton was the father of modern deficit reduction, but no one much cared about that, either, and by the time he left office after two terms, much of the country didn't even realize he'd completely eliminated the deficit and had begun paying off the debt. George W. Bush was the most fiscally irresponsible president in American history, but on the long list of Bush's failures, most Americans don't even consider the $5 trillion he added to the debt. Obama has actually reduced the deficit over the last year, but no one actually hears deficit hawks praising him for it.
This history is so clear, it's amazing how uniformly Versailles can ignore. But they do.
Steve went on to argue the obvious (to Americans, that is):
Voters want the economy to grow. They want more jobs. If they actually cared about the deficit, they'd be outraged by the notion of a new round of tax cuts (they're not), and supportive of measures like the Simpson/Bowles plan (they're really not).
And then he went one step further:
It's not altogether clear people even know what the deficit is. For many, it's likely that the deficit is just something that's "bad." Indeed, given that deficit concerns tend to coincide with economic downturns, some folks might see a correlation -- the deficit is high and the economy is bad, they figure, so maybe if the deficit were lower the economy might get better.
All of this is nonsense, of course, but it's worth remembering when various political players suggest policymakers' popularity is riding on deficit reduction. It's not.
There is, of course, strong evidence for this. People really do seem to respond to--even repeat--the meme that since households are cutting back spending, government should do the same, even though macro-economics tells us unequivocally that the opposite is true. Now that even President Obama is spewing this nonsense, it's not likely that ordinary folks are going to get a clue. But even so, the CBS poll figures speak for themselves. It's just not an issue for the vast majority of them.
So why is it an issue for Versailles? Reason number one is that the President is a Democrat.
Versailles tut-tutted over the deficit When Reagan and Bush I were in the White House, but was basically fine with letting Congress futz around with it for more than a decade. It only became an urgent imperative for the President after Clinton took office. Then, as soon as Bush came in, blowing the Clinton surplus was the first order of business. It was spend like a drunken sailor time. "Reagan proved deficits don't matter, his VP said," and everyone nodded approvingly. Now Obama's President, so of course deficits are the kiss of death once again.
"Okay," you say, "but why is that?" Simple: It's the most efficient way to cripple any possible broad expansion of the welfare state. Not only that, but it's an all-purpose way to create hurdles and mobile opposition to any substantial form of economically activist government.
It is, in short, an all-purpose toll to make sure that however a Democrat might want to run for President, in the end he (or she) will be reduced at best to be governing as purely a social liberal, and that makes it increasingly easy to appeal to frustrated economic populists. Put simply, this is an integral part of how Republicans drive the dynamic of the culture war to their benefit over the long run.
There is a secondary reason at play, but it's more nebulous, and to some extent seems to be simply a global echo of the first reason, and that is the curious emergence of a global austerity aka "pain" caucus that's been puzzling Paul Krugman and Brad DeLong ever since early this year, when the OECD rather unexpectedly turned against fiscally stimulative policies.
As both Krugman and DeLong have noted on numerous occassions, there just doesn't seem to be any logic to this position. Krugman, in particular, has repeatedly asked, "What model are they using?" and concluded that they don't have one. And most recently, he's taken note of how economists have turned against even expansionary monetary policy from the Fed ("quantitative easing"), here, here, and here just since Saturday, for example. Deficit/debt reduction is a coherent expression of this ideological stance against stimulus of any kind, even if there is no coherent logic behind it, and it seems to be the result of exporting American rightwing political economy to the rest of the world.
