Linkmeister

I've seen this movie before. It was bad then too.

Remember the rush to war in Iraq back in 2003? Remember how our media and the "elites" in this country all went along with it, maybe with a little stroking of their beards, but without raising much of a stink?

Chris Hayes of The Nation says it's happening again with deficits. I agree with him, as does Digby.

We're being told once again that the important people are far smarter than we are, so that idea we have about fixing unemployment and getting people back to work will just have to wait a decade or so while we solve the deficit problem.

Back in '03 it was Richard Perle and James Woolsey and Max Boot and Bill Kristol and Paul Wolfowitz pushing for war in Iraq. Today it's the entire Republican party and Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson and Pete Peterson and his foundation and the Concord Coalition, all demanding the deficit be addressed Right Now.

Here's Hayes:

The hysteria has reached such a pitch that Republican senators (joined by Nebraska Democrat Ben Nelson) have filibustered an extension of unemployment benefits because it was not offset by spending cuts. Keep in mind, the cost of the extension for people unlucky enough to be caught in the jaws of the worst recession in thirty years is $35 billion. The bill would increase the debt by less than 0.3 percent.

This all seems eerily familiar. The conversation—if it can be called that—about deficits recalls the national conversation about war in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. From one day to the next, what was once accepted by the establishment as tolerable—Saddam Hussein—became intolerable, a crisis of such pressing urgency that "serious people" were required to present their ideas about how to deal with it. Once the burden of proof shifted from those who favored war to those who opposed it, the argument was lost.

We are poised on the same tipping point with regard to the debt. Amid official unemployment of 9.5 percent and a global contraction, we shouldn't even be talking about deficits in the short run. Yet these days, entrance into the club of the "serious" requires not a plan for reducing unemployment but a plan to do battle with the invisible and as yet unmaterialized international bond traders preparing an attack on the dollar.

And the trouble is, just like in 2003, those of us on the outside are being told that we should listen to the serious people who know better than we what the right prescription for the problem is.

Well, guess what? I was right about Iraq when I said it was "the wrong war against the wrong enemy," and I'm perfectly willing to bet I'm right again today when I say that deficit reduction will take care of itself if we can get the 15 million Americans currently unemployed back to work doing useful and meaningful jobs.

Update: In the comments Harold points to a blog post from Paul Krugman taking note of the Hayes article.

Let me rub a little salt in the wound: if the Iraq parallel is any guide, even after everything has gone wrong, and the US economy has slid into a deflationary trap; even after most people concede that austerity was a mistake; still, only those who went along with the mistake will be considered “serious”, while those who argued strenuously against a disastrous course of action that “everyone” supported will continue to be considered flaky and unreliable.

Posted by Linkmeister at July 16, 2010 12:01 AM | TrackBack