Saturday, November 22, 2003

Fiscal Sanity

Brad DeLong responds:

Well, I expect a return to fiscal discipline after 2004. There's a good chance Bush will lose--and that his loss will drag down enough other candidates that the Democrats will have at least one house of congress as well. And even if Bush doesn't lose the 2004 election, there's a good chance that the normal vicious infighting of White House politics will throw up a different group of hands to operate the sock puppet.


Not even eternally optimistic me believes that the Democrats have a reasonable chance of taking back the House or obtaining more than a razor-thin majority in the Senate. I think there's a much greater chance of winning the presidency than getting back either the House or Senate. Under that scenario, the legislative branch is still effectively run by Tom DeLay. DeLay would rather kill his own mother and french kiss Michael Jackson on national television than raise taxes, except possibly some hideously regressive stuff. The problem with the kind of fiscal hole that we're getting into is that you a hit a point at which the remedies are too painful to be politically palatable. In better economic times, the required solution is easy. But if we wait too long, the fiscal mess causes an economic mess, and solving the former requires measures which aren't exactly what you want to do in the middle of a recession. The DeLay solution will, of course, be to cut taxes - it's the solution for every problem.