It's Hard to Pay Down Debts When There's Less Money Coming In

I came down hard on Ezra Klein when he spouted Villager nonsense, so I want to thank him for exposing one of the biggest budget lies.

Via Digby:

Ezra Klein takes on the silly trope used by both parties that the government is like a household and has to "tighten its belt" when times are tough. You all know that's the opposite of the truth, but to most people it seems intuitive. There's no excuse for Democrats being so lazy and unimaginative that they just succumb to it however. If they were real liberals, they'd care, but since most of them aren't, they're fine with perpetuating a myth that will only result in starving the economy at times it needs it the most ...

Liberalism has taken a huge hit the last couple of years with the Democrats failing miserably to make the public understand what happened, who was responsible and how to fix it. As a result, we are obsessing about deficits when millions of people are still unemployed. It's sad.

Ezra mentions one obvious point that I can't believe nobody ever brings up when the Republicans are parroting their tired trope "we don't have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem" (and I want to hurl my shoes like an Egyptian.) It's quite simply, the opposite:

[W]hat’s happened over the past few years is that the deficit has increased primarily because revenues — for reasons related to both tax cuts and the financial crisis — have plummeted. People, however, have looked at the increase in the deficit and assumed it was the product primarily of new spending, as most people’s incomes don’t fluctuate very much and so big debts tend to imply big expenses.

Read the whole thing for Digby's liberal version of the "home budget" trope.

Have you talked to your Democratic neighbors today?