While sifting through talk about Bush's budget today, I have been unable to avoid a question that keeps popping up in my mind: is talking about the deficit good politics for progressives and Democrats?
When it comes to Bush, we talk about the deficit quite a bit. For example, Senator Reid's office put out this release:
The Presidentıs Plan Adds Over $4.5 Trillion in Debt. ³Over the first ten years that the plan actually was in effect (2009-18), it would add more than $1 trillion to the debt. Over the next ten years (2019- 28), it would add over $3.5 trillion more to the debt. All told, the plan would add more than $4.5 trillion to the debt over its first 20 years.² [Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, ³New Details Indicate Administration Social Security Plan,² 2/2/05]
http://www.cbpp.org/2-2-05socsec4.htm
Via NPR,
Kos notes:
NPR reports that these budget cuts amount to 6 percent of the deficit. The tax cuts, on the other hand, make up 50 percent of the deficit.
This is just a sampling from today. More famous instances include the winning ad in
MoveOn.org's Bush in Thirty Seconds contest, Howard Dean's repeated insistance on balanced budgets during his Presidential run, and Kerry's repeated insistence throughout the campaign that Bush had an enormous budget surplus but he turned it into an enormous budget deficit.
Needless to say, we have come to talk about the deficit--a lot. My worry is that our continued harping on the budget deficit not only gains us nothing, but actually enables conservatives because it allows people to think like conservatives in other ways. Here are my complaints in the form of bullet points:
- Talking about the enormous budget deficit reinforces the idea that government must be made smaller, no matter what programs are cut.
- Talking about it from a government waste frame--that spending money on interest payments is a poor use of tax dollars--is inherently conservative.
- Talking about it in our favorite frame, as a "birth tax," not only bestows legitimacy upon the Republican "death tax" frame for the estate tax, but also bestows legitimacy upon the idea that all taxes are bad no matter what programs they support.
- The deficit, whether real or not, is always an abstraction. To talk about abstract economic problems during times when many people are facing real problems making ends meet dehumanizes our economic policy. After all, how are we helping people by balancing the budget? Perhaps just as importantly, how can we convince people we are helping them by balancing the budget?
What am I missing? Is there a good way to talk about the deficit? What do we gain by talking about the deficit? Someone is going to have to help me on this front, because I can't see anything positive coming from it at all. Enlighten me.
