The "Concern" About The Deficit is BULLSHIT

and democrats need to forcefully make that case:

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The paranoia over the deficit is particularly pernicious, and particularly lacking in empirical foundation. In the 2014 fiscal year, which began at the start of this month, the federal deficit is expected to come in at just 3.4 per cent of Gross Domestic Product, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. That’s down from 10.1 per cent of G.D.P. in 2009, when the Great Recession was at its height. And next fiscal year, the deficit will fall even further, to 2.1 per cent of G.D.P.

No, you didn’t misread those figures. When President Obama says, as he did the other day, that the deficit has been cut in half, he is substantially understating what has happened in the past two or three years. (As recently as 2011, the deficit was still close to nine per cent of G.D.P.) With modest, but persistent, economic growth boosting tax revenues, and with Congress and the President introducing repeated measures to trim spending growth, the deficit, by the end of this fiscal year, will have dropped by about two thirds relative to its 2009 level. By fiscal 2015, it will have fallen by close to eighty per cent.

Already, dramatic progress has been made—perhaps too dramatic. We don’t yet have the official figures for the last fiscal year, which ended on September 30th. (That’s not just because many government statisticians spent more than two weeks on furlough. Even in normal times, it takes a while to collate the numbers.) But according to the C.B.O.’s latest estimate, the 2013 deficit was about four per cent of G.D.P. That’s a drop of roughly sixty per cent, relative to G.D.P., in the past four years.

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What policymakers in Congress should be doing is easing up—and, indeed, partially reversing—the recent shift toward austerity, and looking for ways to solve the long-term problem. But, of course, that’s not what’s happening. According to the Times, negotiators on both sides have already ruled out making any significant changes to retirement programs and are instead focussing on “more modest confidence building measures to replace the sequestration cuts in 2014.” In other words, more cuts to domestic programs to replace the existing reductions, which Republicans don’t like because they fall largely on the military.

What is the economic rationale for these cuts? With the deficit well under control, there isn’t one. But don’t waste your time pointing that out on Capitol Hill. Up there, the deficit bogeyman still lays down the law.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2013/10/slaying-the-deficit-bogeyman.html