Is tackling the deficit bad politics?

July 11, 2011|By Jesse Singal, Globe Staff

By Jesse Singal

It's a bit surreal watching what's going on in Washington at the moment. Yes, we need to raise the debt ceiling, and yes, it's instructive to watch the political equivalent of a 50-car pileup that is going on at the moment. But more broadly than that, it's hard not to wonder how we got here, to a place where, to steal a weekend headline from yesterday's New York Times, the unemployed became invisible. Even with little sign of the jobs situation improving, Washington has become obsessed with the much less pressing—in the short term at least—issue of the deficit. For President Obama and like-minded members of his cabinet and party, this isn't just a bad decision on moral grounds, given the number of Americans who are suffering during a down economy—it's a bad decision on political grounds as well.

I don't want to rehash the endless debate over whether or not there is, in fact, a deficit crisis so dire we should be addressing it immediately; instead, look at this chart from the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which has been passed around the Internet like an especially cute baby, and for good reason. If you take away the Bush tax cuts, ramp down the wars, and kick-start the economy, the "crisis" shrinks down to something much less scary-sounding. (Incidentally, as much as "entitlements" are lumped together into one big bag of fiscal irresponsibility, there simply isn't a Social Security problem anything along the lines of what the wannabe-cutters would have you believe; rather, future skyrocketing costs will mostly come from Medicare, as yet another chart—this one from the CBO—shows.)

So it's hard to see how the deficit, at the moment, is a more pressing issue than unemployment (especially given that fixing the latter will, in the long run, help the former). And yet all one hears about is the deficit, from pundit and politician alike, while the jobless languish.

And while the conventional Beltway wisdom is that Americans are very concerned with the nation's debt and are desperate for politicians to demonstrate "fiscal responsibility" (that is, by contriving urgent indignation over a non-crisis), the facts suggest otherwise, that a refocusing on jobs and the current state of the economy in general could not only improve the lives of Americans, but also the prospects of Obama and his party.