Tonight was a great opportunity to take on the political status quo that has given us trillion dollar deficits and put millions out of work. Our objective was to inject some common sense into the conversation among Republicans at a time when business-as-usual simply won’t work.
But if they want to really think about the fiscal future of this country, then think about how we have moved from hundreds of billions of surpluses to hundreds of billions of deficits.
Thanks to decades of accumulated federal budget deficits and, more significantly, imprudent Medicare and Social Security policies, we’ve stolen almost $60 trillion from our children.
The most positive step is to try to expand the employment base by making it, if not economically friendly, at least not economically disastrous, for studios to take on deficits.
Larger deficits are necessary and proper means to mitigate unemployment as the far greater evil in terms of human welfare.
Mr. Obama denounced the $2.3 trillion added to the national debt on Mr. Bush’s watch as ‘deficits as far as the eye can see.’ But Mr. Obama’s budget adds $9.3 trillion to the debt over the next 10 years. What happened to Obama the deficit hawk?
Maybe that first, gigantic deficit the Reaganites piled up was an accident, just a combination of deluded ‘supply side’ tax cuts and a huge bag of good stuff for the Pentagon. But pretty quickly conservatives discovered that deficits, when done correctly, did something really cool: deficits defunded the Left.
Cutting budget deficits can never be just an exercise in economics.
The world is likely to view any temporary extension of the income tax cuts for the top two percent as a prelude to a long-term or permanent extension, and that would hurt economic recovery as well by undermining confidence that we’re prepared to make a commitment today to bring down our future deficits.
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