The Problem With Waste Is The Waste

Like Atrios, I think there's something oddly pointless about the fetishization of long-term deficit projections:

We should spend less money on stupid wars. We should bring down the cost of our health care system, because we spend stupid amounts of money for a mediocre product, and a lot of that (most!) is government spending. But we shouldn't maintain the fantasy that any of these things will lower the deficit. If, for example, we reduce the rate of growth in health care costs, this means that future lawmakers will spend less money on health care than projected. It does not mean that the deficit will be lowered. It will only lower the deficit if lawmakers don't cut taxes on rich people or spend more money on future stupid wars.

Right. The problem with spending money in wasteful ways, is that it's wasteful to do so. The waste is bad and shifting resources to better uses would be a good idea. But the thing about the deficit that people tend to forget is that the last time the budget deficit went away, the conservative movement took the view that debt reduction was a bad thing. It's not that conservatives argued that cutting taxes was more important than reducing the deficit (though obviously they think that), they actually argued that one reason to cut taxes is that the existence of budget surpluses was a policy problem that had to be addressed. George W Bush gave the populist version of this argument, deeming the existence of a surplus a sign that the government was overcharging residents. And Alan Greenspan gave the highbrow view of this argument, theorizing that debt reduction would lead to government ownership of non-bond financial instruments and thus socialism.

Sadly, Beltway conventional wisdom fails to grasp the basic asymmetry that exists around this. There are many things progressives care about more than deficit reduction. But conservatives don't care about deficit reduction at all. They believe that absence of a deficit is a policy problem that needs to be remedied by large tax cuts.