The deficit hawks are on the march–and this is a bi-partisan din. And it is basically nonsense designed to open the door to some very draconian cuts in our basic social safety net. Here is Dean Baker:

Relative to the size of the economy, the deficits that we are running are large and the debt that we are projected to incur is substantial, but the deficit level is still not coming close to the levels hit in World War II. Nor is the debt level projected to reach post-war peaks or the levels sustained by countries like Italy and Japan. The idea that we are near some debt-driven crisis is absurd on its face.

   Neither Baker, nor yours truly, are saying we should just spend money without looking at the effects. The point is: we are nowhere near the calamity that the deficit Chicken Littles are yelling about. And the party of the Common Man (and Woman) should not be contributing to the misconceptions, as Dean argues:

But Republicans don’t have a monopoly on demagoging the deficit. During the Bush years, many Democrats spoke of the Bush deficits in cataclysmic terms. This was absurd. The deficits were larger than was desirable during part of the Bush administration (large deficits in 2002 and 2003 were helpful in boosting the economy), but they were not hugely out of line. There is certainly no story that can pass the laugh test in which these deficits are responsible for the collapse of the housing bubble and subsequent recession.

There were plenty of grounds to attack President Bush for the economy’s performance under his watch. Most importantly, he let an $8 trillion-dollar housing bubble grow unchecked, and giving big tax cuts to the wealthy is not the way to create an educated workforce and a modern infrastructure.

   The real question is not a accountant’s eye-shade problem. It’s a question of priorities. For example, do you spend $650 billion on a bloated defense budget–that includes unwise wars–or do you spend it on health care and long-term investments on road and bridges? And when the checks are cut for those investments, should the wealthiest people in society begin to again pay their fair share–which, by the way, would make the Chicken Littles voice a lot less shrill because we’d have a whole lot more income in the house.