Why Does Robert Samuelson Have Such a Difficult Time Dealing With Reality

This is from Dean Baker, who always hits the nail on the head.--SS

Why Does Robert Samuelson Have Such a Difficult Time Dealing With Reality:

Robert Samuelson gave us a true Washington Post (a.k.a. Fox on 15th Street) classic in his column today. He tells us that the right is unrealistic because it thinks that it can solve the deficit problem by cutting government waste. The left is unrealistic because they think they can solve the deficit problem by cutting the military and taxing the rich. This means ..... drumroll please .....

THE TRUTH LIES IN THE MIDDLE.

Okay, as we know, the Post always looks for what they identify as the center of the political spectrum, which it substitutes for the truth. While Samuelson concludes that all right-thinking people support cuts to Social Security and Medicare and increased taxes on the middle class, let's try looking at the evidence instead of hunting for the political center.

First, the evidence suggests that there is no deficit crisis, there is a jobs crisis. We have more than 25 million people unemployed, underemployed, or out of the workforce altogether. This is causing us to lose nearly $1 trillion a year in potential output in addition to the enormous strain it imposes on the unemployed and their families. And the effect of prolonged unemployment is likely to leave many of these people permanently unemployed.

Meanwhile the bond markets keep yelling at us to borrow more money. The interest rate on 10-year Treasury bonds is just a bit over 2.0 percent. In other words, the evidence is that we need not do anything about the deficit any time soon. What we need to do is spend money on jobs programs, assisting state and local governments, infrastructure, retrofitting buildings to make them more energy efficient and on other important needs.

Okay, but one day we will have a deficit problem if the Congressional Budget Office's projections are correct. If the folks who looked for truth in the center instead looked for truth in the data, they would see the whole shortfall is due to our broken health care system. If we paid the same amount per person for our health care as people in other wealthy countries then we would be looking at huge budget surpluses, not deficits.

Sure, it's not easy to fix health care, but is that an excuse for not talking about it? And some things may not be all that difficult. What's wrong with a little free trade in health care? Does the center have to be so protectionist?

In terms of other deficit issues, if we got our military budget to the same share of GDP as it was in pre-September 11th days we would save more than $2 trillion over the next decade. If we imposed a tax on financial speculation, like the one that the UK currently has on stock trades and the European Union is considering for a wide range of assets, then we can get as much as $1.5 trillion in revenue over the next decade.

And we can have the Federal Reserve Board simply hold all those bonds that it has been buying the last few years as part of its quantitative easing program. The interest paid on these bonds is refunded from the Fed to the Treasury, meaning that it has no net cost to the government. That could save us around $800 billion in interest over the decade.

In short, if we look at the evidence rather than hunt for the political center, we see a very different world. We see first that there is no current deficit crisis. Then we see that there are many possible solutions to whatever deficit problem may exist in the long-term that do not require whacking middle class and lower income workers who have been the victims of national economic policy over the last three decades.