The editors of the Washington Post provide a list of alternatives for reducing the federal deficit and a handy questionnaire for evaluating your own preferences. They write:
They characterized my responses as “Pragmatic Balancer”:
You cut spending and you raised taxes, spreading the adjustment widely enough that no single group carries it alone. It’s an approach designed to be politically possible while getting the situation under control.
I think they omitted a number of key points. First, there is empirical evidence that a large public debt overhang impedes economic growth. That rules out the easy approach: just outgrow the debt. We cannot safely assume growth will rescue us, especially when accumulated debt may itself weaken growth.
The second is that the graph they display overstates how frequently we have balanced the budget. It conceals how dependent those results were on a temporary demographic advantage. In only one year did the Clinton Administration produce a substantial budget surplus without counting Social Security’s surplus. That should give us pause. The opposite is the case now.
