"Fiscal Conservatism" is Neither

Via Digby, a great piece on deficit stupidity by Chris Hayes:

The discussion about deficits and debt in Washington is so colossally stupid and disingenuous that even engaging it makes me despair. But today's Politico so expertly packages together every conceivable Beltway Establishment inanity about "spending" and "deficits" into one glib little piece of analysis that I can't help myself ....

There's one big maddening conceptual error at the heart of this piece (whether committed in good faith or bad I can't say) which is to confuse relatively substantial pieces of domestic legislation with a spending "binge." See, a government, like any organization, institution, or firm has expenditures and revenues. Miraculously, it can increase its expenditures, without increasing its deficit, if it also increases its revenues. This is called "deficit neutral" and it's what the current health care bill, in all its incarnations, is. It is what the cap and trade bill will also be.

SNIP

You may object to government doing the things it's doing. You may think the working poor should just suck it up when they get sick, or that we should subject Bangladesh to a horrific future in which it is plunged into the sea, but you can't say that the motivation for your objection is accounting.

This disingenuousness drives me bonkers, particularly since, as I and others have noted ad nauseum, military spending is simply never considered a relevant part of the balance sheet.

SNIP

Fiscal conservatism and deficit concern is nearly always code speak in Washington for something else: sometimes it's class warfare, or just a cheap partisan attack. Most often, when someone in Washington says they're concerned about the deficit, what they're really saying is "I would like to make sure we have a government that focuses maximally on blowing people up."

Digby adds her inimitable insight:

None of that matters. What matters is that the Villagers believe that Americans must suffer. It isn't about economics, it's about some sort of religious sacrifice. They've been leading up to this since Obama's election.

SNIP

The deficit is the bludgeon used by the wealthy bondholders to beat liberals into retreat on doing anything that might make average citizens feel that democratic government might be a better guarantor of economic security than their rich overlords (who are doing "God's Work" allegedly on their behalf.)

The press corps and the political establishment are happily doing their bidding and the fact that they are actually blabbering on about the deficit while we have more than 10% unemployment proves that we have gone down the rabbit hole -- and they are filling it in behind us.

It's class warfare. It always has been and it always will be. Those at the top who are waging it and those at the bottom who are dying from it know this. It's only we in the middle who still believe they have a chance to move up who deny the reality. But as more of us fall into the ranks of economic cannon fodder, it's just a matter of time before there's no middle left and we all take sides.