Whenever I hear Republicans whining about the deficit, I just smile, not only because their sudden concern about deficits--after remaining complicit for eight years while George W. Bush doubled the national debt--is funny, but more importantly because it represents a return to a more natural order of politics. One of the most refreshing changes caused by the election of Barack Obama was that it allowed Republicans to return to their customary role of fulminating about fiscal responsibility, while Democrats can return to their traditional role of promising more goodies for the people. That natural order was reversed for a full 28 years previously, and that was always confusing to me, and pretty much turned me off of politics for the entire period. We entered the looking glass when Ronald Reagan was elected. Instead of worrying about the deficit, he persuaded people to worry more about taxes and big government. As a result of his tax-cutting policies, the deficit started ballooning, but people didn't seem to care all that much about it. So from 1980 through 2008, although the Republicans sometimes professed to be concerned about deficits, they never did anything much to reduce them, instead promising to keep cutting taxes, while letting others worry about the deficit. The worriers during that period turned out to be Democrats, who suddenly and unnaturally became the party of fiscal responsibility. During Bill Clinton's term, the Democrats actually succeeded in turning the federal deficit into a substantial surplus. A lot of good that did the Democrats politically, as Congress fell into Republican control during Clinton's term, and he was followed by the most reckless tax cutter and deficit spender in history, George W. Bush.
President Obama is now presiding over an even greater increase in the federal deficit as a result of and in order to cure the country of the deep recession we entered in 2008. Of course, substantial deficit spending would have occurred regardless of who was elected, due to reduced tax revenues, increased unemployment and other social welfare claims, and the need for some form of increased spending or tax cutting to end the recession. Obama is smart politically to profess a concern for rooting out wasteful spending, and to set a goal of deficit reduction over the next few years. But as I mentioned in a previous post, it still seems premature to panic about deficit spending. We are not even close to having the problems that are occurring in Greece, and significant cutbacks in government spending would likely slow the economy down again, which would not exactly help the government get its books back in balance. For the Democrats to become deficit hawks again would also seem dumb politically, despite polls that purport to show increased public concern about deficit spending. What Democrats need to do, as Ronald Reagan so brilliantly did, is to find something else for Americans to be more concerned about than deficit spending. Reagan convinced us to become more concerned about taxes and big government, so we would stop worrying about the deficit. Democrats should focus on concerns about unemployment and economic stagnation, because those problems are much more serious than deficit spending, particularly in the short term. Democrats should not be so quick to wish to return to the unnatural order that prevailed for the strange 28 years prior to 2008.
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