Deficit Spending

Republicans are suddenly alarmed by deficit spending. That was not the case when George W. Bush was President and Republicans controlled Congress, and they know it. According to an Associated Press report, Republican senators say their change of mind is due to the fact that the economy is in worse shape now and the American public is anxious. I suppose Republican senators previously believed it was okay to engage in deficit spending because the economy was in good shape and people were not worried about it.

That provokes two thoughts:

1. Government leaders should concern themselves about deficit spending also in good times; and
2. Their concern about deficit spending should not depend on the public mood.

A government should live within its means. But its management should be pragmatic: questions of economic policy should be determined with reference to experience, current insights of scientific inquiry, and current realities. It seemed to me, back in 2006, that the policies of our Republican-dominated government would lead us to ruin, because they were pretty much unconcerned with past experience, economic realities, and the opinions of economists.

According to the AP report, the Obama administration is engaging in deficit spending only to "pull the economy from the severe recession of 2008-09." As far as I know, the majority of economists support the Obama administration's economic policy. The AP report also mentions that Obama and other Democrats have vowed to return to the Clinton "pay as you go" restrictions for government spending, whereby "most tax cuts or program expansions [have] to be offset elsewhere with tax increases and spending cuts." But we can only return to that standard when it is pragmatically feasible.

Alex Budarin