Sunday Night Owls: Stop worrying about budget deficits and spend (invest) however much is needed

Night Owls, a themed open thread, appears at Daily Kos seven days a week

38 DAYS UNTIL JOE BIDEN AND KAMALA HARRIS TAKE THE OATH OF OFFICE

At The Atlantic, Annie Lowrey writes—Stop Worrying About Budget Deficits. Red ink isn’t a problem as long as the country is spending on the right things:

Ten years ago, the United States was clawing its way out of a miserable recession. Washington was running an annual deficit of $1.3 trillion, and the national debt had reached $9 trillion, roughly 60 percent of GDP. Those figures were frightening enough to spur the Obama White House and Congress to create a panel of experts to address the long-term budget and to kick-start several rounds of government austerity, making cuts to the defense budget and a wide range of domestic programs.

Today, the country is clawing its way out of another miserable recession. Washington is running an annual deficit of $3.1 trillion, and the national debt has reached $21 trillion, more than 100 percent of GDP. Yet even as some Republicans are beginning to warn of the need for belt-tightening in the coming years, Congress is considering another large stimulus on a bipartisan basis, Democrats are vowing not to allow President Donald Trump’s deficits to squeeze out their own priorities, and few if any are warning about the wrath of the bond market and death by red ink.

A quiet revolution is happening in economists’ understanding of deficits and debts, with Democrats abandoning many of their concerns about long-term spending pressures and Republicans clinging to a queasy yes-for-us, no-for-you position on deficit spending. That revolution is a complicated one, driven by falling interest rates and by the changes to demographics, private saving, corporate behavior, monetary policy, and global investment flows behind them. But fiscal responsibility means something different today: Stop worrying and learn to love red ink.

A number of lessons have emerged from the past decade. The first and perhaps most important is to run a deficit. Or, put more technically, the United States should abandon the goal of balancing its budget when the economy is good, and it should run deficits, sometimes large deficits, in perpetuity. [...]

THREE OTHER ARTICLES WORTH READING

• Hero to Zero, by Kim Kelly. Concern for essential workers becomes a casualty of pandemic fatigue  
• The Right Wants the Culture War to Turn Deadly, by Talia Lavin. By openly embracing Kyle Rittenhouse as a hero, Republicans make their violent fantasies clear.  
• Joe Biden Met With Civil Rights Leaders, and I’m Going to Need Him to Watch His Tone, by Stephen A. Crockett Jr.  

QUOTATION

“All historical writing, even the most honest, is unconsciously subjective, since every age is bound, in spite of itself, to make the dead perform whatever tricks it finds necessary for its own peace of mind.” ~~Carl Lotus Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers (2003)

TOP COMMENTS • RESCUED DIARIES 

TWEET OF THE DAY

Barr calling Trump a “deposed king ranting” is a hard hit, tarring him post 1/20. He knows Trump’s legal jeopardy is insurmountable & is trying to distance himself. Odds are Trump wouldn’t pardon Barr unless he was willing to take extreme illegal measures to overturn the election

— Tom Joseph (@TomJChicago) December 13, 2020

BLAST FROM THE PAST

At Daily Kos on this date in 2005—Stuart Taylor's Credibility Gap on ScAlito:

In the Bush Administration pushback on ScAlito (he has taken some major hits already), the "outside the White House" pushback is being led by Conservative shill Stuart Taylor (I use "shill" deliberately here because too many people want to treat Stuart Taylor as some nonpartisan. His dishonest work on Monicagate, when he failed to disclose his ties to Kenneth Starr tells you all you need to know about his credibility).

It is important to understand who and what Stuart Taylor is because I suspect he will be leading the Conservative charge on ScAlito in January. And what line is Taylor shilling now for the Wingnuts? That the "liberal media" is unfairly labeling ScAlito as a conservative ideologue with credibility problems.

Of course, coming from a shill like Taylor, the facts have little room in his argument.

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Source: Daily Kos