About those Deficits

Anyone remember in 2009 when the nation was at risk of another Great Depression? Anyone remember all of the tea partiers that talked ceaselessly about "The Road to Serfdom" and the need to "tighten the belt?"

I guess since the president and leaders of Congress now have the letter "R" next to their name (and the president is no longer a kenyan muslim socialist terrorist fist bumper black guy "tax and spend big-government type") "deficits don't matter" again/any more?

I remember charts like the above one, from the Mercatus Center (spoiler alert: right-wing/libertarian organization, but I'm sure you already knew that). What I don't recall, and don't see in that chart, is any acknowledgement of what the federal deficits were from 2001 (remember the surplus?) through 2009. What I also don't recall is Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, et al telling the American people that they planned to run deficits every bit as large as President Obama's. The only difference was that they would run deficits to accomplish the sacred goal of cutting the tax bills of plutocrats, whereas President Obama ran deficits for the stupid liberal goal of providing poor kids healthcare.

Anyway, this:

The ballooning federal budget deficit under President Donald Trump will force the U.S. to borrow more than $1 trillion this year and risks worsening the frenzy behind the global sell-off in stock markets.

The budget deal Senate leaders reached late Wednesday would add nearly $300 billion in government spending over two years and push the deficit higher. Even beforehand, Bank of America Corp. senior U.S. economist Joseph Song warned in a report that the federal deficit was on track to exceed 5 percent of gross domestic product by 2019, by far the largest for the economy while at full employment since World War II.

That is “exactly the opposite of what the economic textbooks say lawmakers should be doing,” Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics Inc., said in an email. “Deficit financed tax cuts and spending increases in a full-employment economy will result in more Fed tightening and higher interest rates.”

The combined impact on the deficit of the Republican tax cuts and the spending deal over the next two years will likely exceed the $580 billion President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus added in 2009 and 2010 during the depths of the recession.

The next person that takes Republican deficit hawkery serious needs to get punched in the face. Hard. Anyone who pays attention knew all along that this was nothing more than a cynical ploy to attempt to shrink the size of government and preclude it from doing anything to help the less fortunate.

Post-Rant Confession: I don't really care about the federal deficit all that much. I think it should be paid down during good times (like times of full employment and a soaring stock market) and should be expanded during bad times (i.e. when there is a generational financial crisis). Mine is the classic Keynesian view of economics, and it has been vindicated repeatedly.