Better Government, or Just Cheaper Government?
One
of the great things about sophistry is that in any argument there is always
enough dust around to throw in people’s eyes. Whatever the argument, the dirt
at your feet is always at hand.
One
of the great things about intellectual honesty is that you don’t take positions
without multiple sources of support. It helps you see through the dust, too.
A
week ago I wrote about how spending under Obama has not been nearly as profligate as is widely thought.
Marc
Comtois, one of the dedicated soldiers of the right who daily lays waste to
armies of straw men over at Anchor Rising, thinks he’s found a nut, and
complains that an article I used in support of that essay had been amply
refuted. (You can find his links in the comments over there.)
What
he doesn’t get is that those refutations are just dust. One can go into the
weeds of the refutations to show that they are just as tendentious as the
original article they critique, but why bother?
Even
if you pretend the article I cited was all wet, there is ample other support
for the assertion that if you really care about responsible spending, you
shouldn’t vote for people who promise cheaper government.
So,
for example, if you don’t like Mr. Nutting and marketwatch.com,
how about the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities? Here’s what they say:
“By
themselves, in fact, the Bush tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
Oh,
wait. You say CBPP is a partisan organization. Well then how about the Cato
Institute? Its director, the late Bill Niskanen had a reputation for
unyielding libertarianism, and also a reputation for intellectual honesty, part
of what has made Cato a source of actually useful data over the years.
He
wrote an article some years ago pointing out that the “Starve the Beast”
strategy of cutting taxes to force spending cuts did not work. In short,
Republicans made deficits bigger and Democrats made them smaller. (Original article, recent follow-up.)
I wrote a follow-up to Niskanen’s
original article pointing
out that the situation was even worse than he wrote (page 2 at the link).
In
other words, pretty much any way you turn, evidence says that if you care about
responsible spending, vote for the people who don’t focus on spending.
Vote
for the people who are talking about what government should do — they’re the
ones who care enough about the enterprise to do it responsibly. And yes, any
given article or set of numbers can be showered with dust, obscuring its meaning.
But dust is for brushing aside.
Now,
all that said, what do I think about this? In basic economics classes,
we’re taught that the Great Depression was ended by demand-side spending — the
spending necessary to fight a World War was of the scale necessary to bring our
nation out of the economic funk of the 1930s.
I
believe that 50 years from now, students in basic economics classes will ask
impertinent questions of their professors when they wonder why, with that
example to go by, the world acted in precisely the opposite way when faced with
the challenges of the Bush depression.
The
fact is that the last three years have seen ample confirmation of the theory
behind Keynesian stimulus, but it’s all been in the wrong direction. We’re
doing the opposite of stimulus, so we get the opposite of prosperity.
Which
is all to say that I’m not defending the Obama austerity. I’m simply stating
the fact that if you want responsible spending, the record — stretching over
decades — says that voting for people who simply promise to make government
cheaper is the wrong way to get it.