Y’all know how I feel about the deficit. Right? I don’t give a crap about it. The U.S. federal debt would have to be crazy, much bigger than it is now, in order to cause real economic problems. And to the extent that I care about the debt at all, it’s clear to me that the engine for reducing the deficit (and therefore the debt) is through a combination of economic growth and price inflation, not through spending cuts or revenue increases. I don’t have much objection to revenue increases—I would object to them during really bad economic times, sure, but during good times if we want to balance the budget by raising taxes, that’s fine with me. As far as I’m concerned, the real benefit to a high rate of taxes on the super-wealthy is to mitigate the problem of the existence of the super-wealthy—it is a problem that there are fifty thousand people or so with so much wealth, and therefore so much influence over the institutions of power, that they can choose viciousness and destruction with impunity. Reducing their power by reducing their wealth (relative to that of the country at large) (at least at first the country—one could make a similar argument about the fifty million or so people who can treat the world’s institutions of power with contempt, and that would probably include Your Humble Blogger and all the Gentle Readers of this Tohu Bohu, and that argument would be entirely correct, too, but admit of even less practical correction) would be the main reason for a millionaire’s surtax of 75% or so; balancing the budget, if it happened, would merely be a side benefit.\n
But there it is: I am far from the mainstream of political thought.\n
What is the mainstream of political thought? It seems to me that we have three large tributaries.\n
There is your Left, Center and Right on the topic. I am not even in the Left—except to the extent that you can stretch the Left one out to the point where the back-burner preferred-if-there’s-no-deficit-problem part is very nearly empty. I’m closer to the opinion I see on the Other Party, where I am happy to reduce the deficit except when it interferes with my actual policy preferences. But it isn’t symmetrical that way, at least not for the last twenty-odd years. And it’s symmetrical the wrong way for me—someone in the Other Party who doesn’t give a crap about the debt can ignore everything that Paul D. Ryan says about the terror of being crushed under the debt burden, knowing that he will never, ever, ever give up on one of his Party’s policy goals to reduce that debt. For Your Humble Blogger, it’s the other way around—no matter how much Our Only President may agree with my on one or another piece of policy, I cannot know whether it will be put on the back burner in order to satisfy the higher priority of deficit reductions.\n
Ah, well. It’s a democracy, is what it is.\n
For further reading: Larry Bartels on the Fiscal Facts of Life<\/a> and Paul Waldman on Phony Hawkery<\/a>.\n Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>, In Which Your Humble Blogger could not possibly care less. No, really, I have tried. I can’t do it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[204],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14148","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14148","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14148"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14148\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16778,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14148\/revisions\/16778"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"