Plenty of Hypocrisy to Go Around

Stan Collender finds himself blown away by Republican hypocrisy:

After making the budget deficit not just a campaign issue but the campaign issue of 2010, one of the very first legislative things the Republicans in Congress will do after the election is agree to a tax cut and extension of unemployment benefits (and god knows what else) that will…wait for it…increase the deficit. The two-year increase in the deficit because of the deal will be greater than the stimulus bill the GOP railed against during the election.

All very true. But there's actually plenty of this sort of weirdness to go around. Recall that one thing that made the Affordable Care Act a much harder sell in congress than the 2003 Medicare expansion is that 2003 Medicare expansion was financed with debt, whereas the ACA reduces the deficit thanks to a number of politically controversial tax hikes and Medicare cuts. But it was the very same members of the Democratic Party—both in the White House and on the Hill—who insisted ACA couldn't increase the deficit by one iota who were totally unwilling to take a strong anti-deficit line on the tax cut expiration issue.

This is particularly egregious because while the long-run deficit reducing potential of ACA is part of the merits of the plan, the short-term deficit neutrality of it has no real policy rationale. Indeed, the deficit neutrality within the ten-year CBO window was achieved in large part simply by not ramping up the spending until 2014. Had Democrats been willing to increase the short-term deficit by having spending kick-in sooner, they'd have preserved the beneficial impact on the long-term deficit, delivered some concrete benefits to people in time for at least the 2012 election, and stimulated the still-weak economy. But they didn't, out of some kind of misguided substantive or political concern about the short-term deficit—concern they happily kicked away in order to forge this tax cut / UI deal.