"The urgency of growth" by E. J. Dionne at WP

[applegrove]

The urgency of growth

by E. J. Dionne at WP

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ej-dionne-its-about-growth-not-the-deficit/2013/01/27/d71fa160-68ba-11e2-af53-7b2b2a7510a8_story.html?tid=sm_btn_reddit

"SNIP.........................................


If you care about deficits, you should want our economy to grow faster. If you care about lifting up the poor and reducing unemployment, you should want our economy to grow faster. And if you are a committed capitalist and hope to make more money, you should want our economy to grow faster.

The moment’s highest priority should be speeding economic growth and ending the waste, human and economic, left by the Great Recession. But you would never know this because the conversation in our nation’s capital is being held hostage by a ludicrous cycle of phony fiscal deadlines driven by a misplaced belief that the only thing we have to fear is the budget deficit.

call a halt to this madness. If we don’t move the economy to a better place, none of the fiscal projections will matter. The economic downturn ballooned the deficit. Growth will move the numbers in the right direction.

Moreover, the whole point of an economy is to provide everyone with real opportunities for gainful employment and economic advance — the generational “relay” that San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro affectingly described at last year’s Democratic convention. When we talk only about deficits, we take our eyes off the prize.


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[unblock]

1. at best, the deficit "problem" is the NEXT problem. as in the one AFTER THIS problem.

the key to knowing when the deficit is a problem is when the government's cost of borrowing is becoming unmanageably high.

it's true that the fed is manipulating interest rates, but they aren't so powerful that they're capable of producing indefinitely near-zero interest rates unless that's fairly close to where the market is saying they really ought to be.

IF and WHEN we have serous inflation, the kind that's virtually impossible with a weak labor market, THEN and ONLY then will the deficit be a serious concern.



the austerity idiots are essentially advocating carter's solution to stagflation (austerity, though he did it through monetary policy) when we stagflation isn't what we have.

[pscot]

2. as opposed to the urgence of global warming

That's the calculus that describes our trajectory.