Guy who thinks debt is hunky dory

This article is funny/annoying. He thinks deficits are sexy, and anyone who would worry about them is an idiot. I have some comments in green.

"...To summarize, deficit hysteria is a hoax concocted by far-right demagogues who are trying to advance their socially-destructive agenda for their own personal gain. Like me. Fortunately, the opposition has mounted an impressive counter-attack and refuted many of the spurious claims made by the deficit worrywarts. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has done a particularly good job of educating the public on the issue and analyzing the movement's supporters. Here's a clip from his article titled "Fiscal scare Tactics": Paul Krugman is far too silly, wrong, and blatantly serving of progressive interests to educate anyone. He's hardly impressive. Iv'e thought of having a blog just to mutilate his ideas, but other people have already done it.

"To me ...the sudden outbreak of deficit hysteria brings back memories of the groupthink that took hold during the run-up to the Iraq war. Now, as then, dubious allegations, not backed by hard evidence, are being reported as if they have been established beyond a shadow of a doubt. Now, as then, much of the political and media establishments have bought into the notion that we must take drastic action quickly, even though there hasn’t been any new information to justify this sudden urgency. Now, as then, those who challenge the prevailing narrative, no matter how strong their case and no matter how solid their background, are being marginalized.

This is blatantly false. If anything, the politicians and media have circled the wagons around Obama and Bernanke to pretend we're having some awesome recovery, it's because Obama saved us, and the drunken sailor spending spree was totally unavoidable. The new information is that Obama and company have spent more money than all previous presidents since George Washington combined. That is a newsflash. I don't know of more than a handful of real economists who think what they are doing makes any sense and can actually work. There are maybe 500 economists and analysts saying, "Keep doing this and you will collapse the world economy." So yeah, we might want to take a look at what they're doing.

True, there is a longer-term budget problem. ....But there’s no reason to panic about budget prospects for the next few years, or even for the next decade (because) interest payments on federal debt; according to the projections, a decade from now they’ll have risen to 3.5 percent of G.D.P. How scary is that? It’s about the same as interest costs under the first President Bush."

This is just plain retarded. He's basing this on the White House's absurd projections of growth, and projecting the near zero interest rates into the future. Nobody on earth thinks either one of those things will happen. When you actually run the numbers using really basic math, you see it gets out of control pretty fast.

Mike Whitney March 5, 2010