Misuse of Language Alert: "Deficit"

The word "deficit" is defined, in political/budgetary terms, as the difference between a government's revenues and that government's outlays. That's what it means. Except that isn't how it gets used in American politics these days, especially not by Republicans but also not by the various portions of the mainstream media that like to pretend that Republicans care about cutting deficits while liberal Democrats don't. Because here's the thing: if you put Nancy Pelosi, Jim Clyburn, Barney Frank, and Bernie Sanders in a room together, they could zero out the deficit in, say, 2018 or 2021, and they could probably get the basic framework of the plan to do so figured out in an hour or so. Maybe less. You'd have a carbon tax, you'd have cuts in defense spending, you'd have the closing of assorted loopholes that favor large corporate interests, and then you'd have some amount of progressive tax increases on top of that, however much was still needed. Maybe you'd throw in something like a public option on health care, depending on how non-budgetary they felt they could get. And voila, the deficit would be gone.


Now, you could also put a handful of conservative Republicans in a room together and let them come up with any plan they liked, and get the deficit gone within ten years. That would probably include a) big tax cuts for rich people, and b) cuts in safety net and other progressively-oriented spending big enough to close the existing deficit and pay for the above tax cuts. And so that's fair enough: conservatives could cut the deficit just as well as liberals could, though not better. And, of course, there's the fact that when given the chance conservatives have so far preferred not to pay for their regressive tax cuts.

So this whole thing just isn't really about "deficits." When anyone right-of-center in this country speaks the word deficit, what they mean is government spending. In particular they mean government spending on things liberals like. It's perfectly fair for Republicans to want a lower taxing/spending equilibrium than Democrats; hell, it's one of the main things the two major political parties in a country should disagree about. And it's also perfectly fair for Republicans to have different priorities about how the tax burden should be distributed, and about what we should spend money on. But there just isn't, or shouldn't be, any sort of debate about the long-term deficit per se. There is ultimately one question about the actual budget-subtraction deficit that half-reasonable people can disagree about, namely whether in a sufficiently bad recession one ought pursue deficit-financed fiscal stimulus. Whichever way you answer that question, and whatever overall level of government you favor, and whatever specific taxes and programs you prefer, after you decide whether you like Keynesian fiscal stimulus the only thing that remains is to make the long-term tax level and the long-term spending level match up so that the debt-to-GDP ratio remains constant or declines to a reasonable level. That's it. It's not that hard: the long-term deficit should never be an issue. It is an issue in this country only because Republicans have pursued a strategy of "starving the beast," where by generating large deficits they hope to lay the groundwork for future massive spending cuts (which they are trying to realize right about now).

Honestly I think the failure of the long-term budget deficit per se to become a non-partisan, non-ideological technocratic issue in this country may be something we can attribute to our political system that distributes power so broadly and therefore spreads accountability so thinly. In a parliamentary system no party would ever think of failing to provide enough long-term tax revenue to finance its own programs. The left-wing party comes in, passes new programs, passes taxes to pay for them. The right-wing party comes in, cuts some of those programs, and cuts some of the taxes they like the least. We don't do it that way in this country.

Anyway, the point of all of this is just that none of this is about the budget deficit strictly defined. The liberal Democrats have their idea for how to balance the budget, and oh yeah, it's a lot more popular than the Republican plan. But the Republicans control the House, and combining that fact with misguided hysteria about short-term cyclical/Keynesian deficits they've managed to make us have a debate about exactly how much of the Republican approach to budget- (which is to say spending-) cutting we're going to engage in.