Just Spend Baby!

Now that the Democrats are in charge of the Great Sausage Factory and within striking distance of the White House again, the phoniness of their deficit-hawkishness of the last several years is starting to reveal itself. Bloomberg covers this development as if it was some sort of intellectual battle, a modern day ontological joust akin to Anselm and Gaunilo. In reality though, the protagonists of this debate have never had any genuine concern over the deficit. They have no desire greater than expanding the role of government. Their teeth gnashing over the deficit during the past few years has had one purpose and that is to justify higher taxes and provide grounds for opposing tax cuts. Now that the balance of power is shifting their way, they can safely discard their deficit concern and a guy like Bernie Schwartz provides the grounds for it in the name of "investing" and "infrastructure". Schwartz's message is clear, forget about the deficit and just spend baby!

Without any help from his now cashiered Republican majority in Congress, the Bush fiscal policy has managed to bring the deficit down below average post-war levels. We've seen this movie before, a tax-cutting President establishes prosperity and gets the fiscal house in as good a shape as can be expected, only to clear the decks for a legendary spending binge that will go down in the record books. That's were we are folks. Bush has teed up Hillary's version of LBJ's Great Society program, and key backers like Bernie Schwartz are cheerleading.