THE DEFICIT DODGE. I'm at the Take Back America conference's Economics panel, where Rep. Jerry Nadler just made a good point on the deficit dodge. "You deliberately create a huge deficit," so that whenever someone says they need 75 new schools, or investment in health care, or an expanded EITC, the Republicans can say, "well, we'd love to, but we have this hundred-million dollar deficit." This is what starve-the-beast economics have evolved into. The working theory used to be that you rob the government of revenue, and then it can't spend. That's not the case. As Cato's William Niskanen has proven, starve-the-beast strategies actually encourage spending by divorcing politicians from the economic consequences of their actions. Where higher taxes used to disincentivize more spending, now you can just keep passing the buck onto future generations. So we get the deficit dodge. It's not that the GOP cares about the deficit, but the people, in theory, do, and it can be used to obstruct otherwise popular investments. So they build it up while in office in order to fund the priorities they won't tax for, then talk it up when in the minority to block liberal legislation that they don't like. Neat trick.
tba2007--Ezra Klein
