...comes out for a jobs package that includes temporary deficit spending. This time it's journalist and former Clinton Administration budget official Matt Miller, writing for the Washington Post:
I got into policy journalism in the late 1980s and government in the early 1990s because of my worries about debt and deficits. I was a warrior for "generational equity" back when I was still (sigh) a member of the younger generation. And I'm as fearful as the next fiscal scold of long-term damage from the gap between federal spending and revenue, not to mention the trillions in unfunded liabilities in public employee pensions at the state and local level.
I come before you, in other words, a deficit hawk to the core. But it is the height of economic folly -- and socially dangerous, in my view -- to elevate deficit reduction as a goal today over boosting jobs and growth. Especially when there are ways to goose the economy while at the same time legislating changes that move us toward fiscal sanity once we're past this stagnation.