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Matt Yglesias notices Ruth Marcus clarifying a more sensibly Keynesian position in a Washington Post chat:
Ruth Marcus: I’m sure I should have been clearer on this in the column, but I was not arguing for mid-recession belt-tightening. We’re all Keynesians now and I am open to stimulative action in the short term. What I am hoping for is that the moment could be used as a way to forge a more responsible, more productivity-enhancing budget in the longer term, that could fund investments in important things like health care, and free the next president from some of his more unaffordable promises.Marcus is making the right points here. And she has written good columns on the need for short-term stimulus in the past, so this isn't just a position she's adopting in response to criticism.The long-term, however, gives rise to sharper disagreements. There's been a peculiar entrenchment of a frame wherein the answer to the budgetary pressure exerted primarily by rising health costs is belt tightening. As Marcus put it in her column, "a new sobriety." But as everyone from Victor Fuchs to Henry Aaron will tell you, the answer to rising costs on the health system is health care reform. Austerity is really neither here nor there. You need to figure out some way to slow spending growth. There's a tendency for folks in Washington to spend a lot of time talking about benefit cuts and means testing and raising the age of eligibility, all of which would save money, but none of which would actually address the fundamental driver of the problem. Raise the Medicare age to 67 without arresting cost growth and five years later, you're in the same place.It's not that I'm unsympathetic to the broader question here. Rather the contrary. I actually agree that we face significant long-term budgetary threats (this is why I'm always arguing that, on a policy level, health care is much more an issue of economics than medicine) and folks -- liberals included -- need to be a whole lot more serious in addressing them. But that means getting serious about health reform, not embarking on a new austerity agenda. I'm pretty sure that Marcus agrees with a lot of this (she's one of the few pundits who regularly deals with health care in her columns), but there's a tendency to couch these columns in the language of "touch choices" and "political courage" rather than being clear about what actually needs to be done. In any case, I'm glad to see more folks stating the need for stimulus clearly. We can argue about the long-term stuff later on.
