Last Minute Cliff Notes
In short:
- The US does not have a budget deficit problem. The current deficit is directly a result of the collapse of the economy. It is cyclical not structural.
- Thus we have a growth problem. Return our economy to growth and the budget gap substantially disappears.
- Further, our cycles are becoming more exaggerated because of the growth in inequality. The incomes of wealthy people tends to be more volatile. Thus the proportion of our total income subject to volatility is growing.
- Longer term we have a problem with our stupendously inefficient health care system. That affects both the government budget and private budgets alike. Attacking Medicare simply shifts the burden of that inefficiency into the private sector. It resolves nothing. Either way our economy suffers.
- As a consequence of our problem being cyclical any discussion that we cannot pay for the things we like – aka entitlements – is specious. Repeating such a thought is to repeat a harmful lie.
- This lie is being disseminated by the right wing of our politics not for budgetary reasons but for ideological reasons.
- Participating in budget deals in order to close our budget gap is to act as an agent of the right wing lie. It is to postulate the existence of something that does not exist. It is to be complicit in the attack on our social system.
- Current policy, based as it is on a false premiss, is a historic error.
That about covers it.
