Deja vu all over again
by digby
I have written more than once that this deficit obsession reminds me of the run-up to the Iraq war. The assumption of consensus, the total dismissal of dissent and the overwhelming sense that it is a runaway train that is simply unstoppable is all very familiar to those who followed the rush to war --- and now, the rush to deficit cutting.
As someone at the center of both debates as a columnist for the New York Times, Krugman is in a perfect position to talk about this odd phenomenon:
[N]ow as then we have the illusion of consensus, an illusion based on a process in which anyone questioning the preferred narrative is immediately marginalized, no matter how strong his or her credentials. And now as then the press often seems to have taken sides. It has been especially striking how often questionable assertions are reported as fact. How many times, for example, have you seen news articles simply asserting that the United States has a “debt crisis,” even though many economists would argue that it faces no such thing?
In fact, in some ways the line between news and opinion has been even more blurred on fiscal issues than it was in the march to war. As The Post’s Ezra Klein noted last month, it seems that “the rules of reportorial neutrality don’t apply when it comes to the deficit.”
There's a whole piece to be written about the similar ways in which the government has sold the phantom "threats" of looming mushroom clouds and national bankpruptcy. Certainly the fact that they were both undertaken in the wake of very scary events lends itself to the notion that certain people are very adept at taking advantage of their opportunities to push agendas that would otherwise make little sense. It's only the politics of the moment, with an opposition party that's dominated by an extreme faction, that's kept them (so far) from inexplicably inflicting long-term austerity on people who will be too old and too sick to work.
As Krugman says:
What we should have learned from the Iraq debacle was that you should always be skeptical and that you should never rely on supposed authority. If you hear that “everyone” supports a policy, whether it’s a war of choice or fiscal austerity, you should ask whether “everyone” has been defined to exclude anyone expressing a different opinion. And policy arguments should be evaluated on the merits, not by who expresses them; remember when Colin Powell assured us about those Iraqi W.M.D.’s?
Unfortunately, that's not working out as well as we might have hoped.
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