The magnificent failure of the grown-up in the room strategy
by digby
A strategy only a villager could love:
The budget deficit is the lowest it has been since President Barack Obama took office, according to a Congressional Budget Office report this week. But don't expect that to matter to the American people.
In fact, the deficit has been falling steadily since 2009. Yet a new HuffPost/YouGov poll shows that Americans still think the deficit is going up and disapprove of Washington politicians accordingly.
It's a painful irony for the jobless, whose livelihoods were sacrificed in the pursuit of deficit reduction over the past several years. Beginning in 2010, the White House shifted its focus from growing the economy to reducing the deficit, hoping to win over swing voters thought to be turned off by too much government spending. As public jobs were slashed and government spending slowed, the economy took the predicted hit. But as the survey shows, there was no political gain that came with the pain.
The administration has since pivoted away from talk of belt tightening and shifted back toward economic growth -- which, economists have pointed out all along, is the fastest way to reduce the deficit.
According to the new poll, 54 percent of Americans think the budget deficit has increased since Obama took office in 2009, while only 19 percent know it has decreased. Fourteen percent think it has stayed the same since Obama became president.
Some of us pointed out many, many moons ago that there would be no political payoff for this. By demagoguing the deficit they plant the idea in people's heads that it's the most intractable problem the nation has ever faced and that the only thing we can do to fix it is slash government as far as the eye can see. The real numbers are irrelevant. Cutting the deficit is like the war on terror --- it will never end. (And if it does, as happened briefly at the end of the Clinton administration, the Republicans will seize power with their stirring message: tax cuts! It's yer muneee!)
The Democrats had a chance to break this cycle because we were in a depression and citizens were looking to the government for solutions. But all the hemming and hawing about "short-term-stimulus-long-term-deficit-just-like-your-family-budget" nonsense ended up confusing the public and they fell back into their old way of thinking. Of course, attacking "the deficit" was always the Democrats' plan because only then could they "get it off the table" and move on to funding all the neat stuff the public really needs and wants.
How's that working out for us?
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