Greg Anrig reminds us that Republicans create deficits to foil progressivism:
President Ronald Reagan’s budget director David Stockman coined the phrase “strategic deficit” to describe the usefulness of creating long-term budgetary shortfalls to undercut political support for governmental spending. As Stockman privately told Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1981, accruing large deficits “gives you an argument for cutting back programs that really weren’t desired and giving you an argument against establishing new programs you don’t really want.” Moreover, strategic deficits can enable opponents of public investments to sound compassionate — “We can’t steal from our children to pay for our short-term desires.”
Of course, the enormity of today’s deficit is, to a large extent, an outgrowth of the severe economic downturn, which depleted tax revenues while generating higher governmental spending as automatic safety-net stabilizers and the stimulus package kicked in — responses that significantly softened the economic blow relative to what it otherwise would have been. But a large chunk of today’s deficit was handed down from President George W. Bush to tie Democrats in knots. With the Obama administration now deciding to endorse a debt commission and a discretionary spending freeze, it is more than a little demoralizing to see that the president and the Democratic Party still haven’t recognized that it’s time to stomp on Stockman’s trap rather than becoming ensnared in it yet again.