Nothing about budget politics in America makes sense
by David Atkins
I examined the bizarre funhouse mirror that is budget politics in one of my posts yesterday at the Washington Monthly. After noting that in the modern era Republican presidents tend to explode deficits while Democratic ones try to close them, I pointed out the inherent craziness of that phenomenon:
But there’s a double absurdity at work here, which is that in a poor economy the country shouldn’t be trying to balance the budget at all. Paul Krugman and the Keynesians have been proven right on this question repeatedly, even as the austerity fetishists and the supply-siders have been proven wrong at every turn. We know now definitively what we should have known instinctually back in 1980: that supply-side economics is junk science and a proven failure. We also know from the European experience that austerity economics only sends countries further into recession—with the added effect of increasing deficits in the bargain, thus supposedly necessitating further cuts in a negative reinforcement loop.
Democrats are supposed to be the party of stimulus and fiscal laxity. Republicans are supposed to be the party of belt-tightening and fiscal austerity. Instead we see repeatedly that Republicans play fast and loose with the nation’s budget in order to deliver tax breaks to their wealthy friends, while Democrats spend their time closing the deficits Republicans create. But even more bizarrely, we see Democrats counterproductively pushing austerity economics when they should be pursuing Keynesian stimulus, even as Republicans ironically vote for stimulus—albeit in its weakest and worst-targeted guise—in the form of tax breaks for the rich.
When budget politics has gone this far into funhouse mirror land, it almost makes popular polling on budget issues irrelevant. How are voters even supposed to know which party represents what policies, or even which economic theory they’re working under? While Republicans are clearly more destructive and wildly irresponsible, both sides are operating in such self-contradictory opposition to their stated economic ideologies and branding that it’s a wonder voters can even make sense of it all.
This is part of what comes of allowing conservatives and neoliberals alike to spout three decades and more of fallacious economic talking points essentially unchallenged. People start to believe things that simply aren't true, and politicians start to believe their own press clippings as well.
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