The Debt and the Deficit Are Different Things

Curmie is no economist, but he is fundamentally honest, often to his detriment in a world overrun by self-aggrandizement, cowardice, and humorlessness.

By the first part of this statement, I do not mean to suggest that I know nothing of economics. I’ve taken only one college level course in economic theory, but that’s one more than most Americans have taken, and whereas I have no idea what a derivative credit default swap is, I do know that manipulation of those little rascals by the reckless and the unscrupulous was a cause of the global financial meltdown of 2008. I know that the idea that banks are “too big to fail” is a hoax propagated by politicians who know the origin of their re-election gravy train (cf. Iceland).

But what Curmie really understands about economics is the basic terminology: terms like deficit and debt, for example. In terms of governmental budgeting, a deficit occurs when, over a specified period of time, usually a fiscal year, more money is being spent than is being collected in revenue. Debt is the accumulated difference between what is owed and what is available. This blog piece is not about whether the debt or deficit ought to be bigger or smaller than they are. Rather, it’s about basic terms and basic honesty.

You see, Gentle Reader, both political parties in this country purport to care a great deal about these things: the fact that neither side really gives a shit about the bottom line, but only about how we get there, is to be ignored for the moment. There are some things about which honest people of all political stripes can agree: the deficit is going down, and the debt is going up. The Wall Street Journal reports that, “For the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, the Congressional Budget Office estimates a deficit of $642 billion, compared with $1.087 trillion a year earlier and the smallest gap since 2008's $458.55 billion shortfall.” In other words, there’s roughly $400 billion less deficit and close to two-thirds of a trillion dollars more debt than a year ago.

And here is where we invoke the second half of Curmie’s self-declaration: the part about being honest. It will come as no surprise to you, Gentle Reader, that leaders on both sides of the aisle are lying through their teeth at every opportunity less than entirely forthright about this whole business. Whether lower deficits and/or debt are intrinsically good things hardly matters: both parties are pretending they are, so the Dems are pretending there’s no problem because the deficit is shrinking, and the GOP is doing their Chicken Little impersonation because the debt is increasing.

That may be more spin than substance on both sides, but at least it’s readily identifiable as political business-as-usual. We started getting into more problematic territory when the usual suspects actually start lying. Needless to say, I wouldn’t be writing this if we didn’t have someone from both sides doing just that.

We start, chronologically, with House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), who taped an interview with Chris Wallace of Fox News on August 2 that aired on August 4. Here’s the key section of these remarks: “What we are trying to do is fund the government and make sure also that we take away the kinds of things that are standing in the way of a growing economy, a better health care. And all the while keeping our eye focused on trying to deal with the ultimate problem, which is this growing deficit.” [Both here and below, the emphasis is mine.]

Needless to say, Wallace, good little Fox minion that he is, didn’t correct him. And the incompetent yahoos at PolitiFact even gave him a “Half True” because, you see, although Cantor’s statement is so much equine fecal matter now, current projections are that, absent changes to policy, the deficit will indeed start to increase three years down the road to a point still less than the status quo. The logic—and I use the word loosely—of the PolitiFact idiocracy would similarly suggest that although I am writing this piece at about 11:00 at night, if I say the sun is shining brightly through my window, it’s half true, since it might well be doing so tomorrow afternoon.

No, one of three things is true. I list them here in increasing likelihood of being the correct explanation: 1). It was an honest mistake, a slip of the tongue. 2). Cantor really is so stupid that he doesn’t know the deficit and the debt are different things. 3). He’s lying, and being rather smug about it.

On to third-term Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA), who was pretending to care about veterans attending a discussion of veterans’ affairs in Shreveport. She “corrected” a veteran who expressed concern about the increasing national debt. According to retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Andre E. Dean, “She assured him that the United States did not have an increasing national debt. She then proceeded to tell all of us that for the past six to seven years the federal government had been continuously driving the federal debt down and reducing it, NOT increasing it.”

OK, this is even stupider that Cantor’s comment. For one thing, it’s even less likely to be a slip of the tongue—she was “correcting” a true statement. (Neither Cantor nor Landrieu have, as far as I can tell, admitted a mistake.) But not even the deficit has been falling for “six to seven years.” The biggest deficit was in FY2009, which was… um… four years ago. On the other hand, there’s a less likelihood that Landrieu was consciously lying, because—unlike Cantor—she really is stupider than snake spit, really is utterly inept, and really might not know that “debt” and “deficit” are different things (or that four is less than six, for that matter).

Whose offense was greater? Cantor, who is probably one of the half dozen most important figures in his party and ought to be held to a higher standard, or Landrieu, who apparently belittled a veteran while yammering nonsense that wouldn’t have been accurate even if she hadn’t confused her terms? Cantor, who was talking to a national television audience and should have been prepared to choose his words wisely, or Landrieu, who was picking a fight with a constituent?

I’ve gotta go with Landrieu’s as the more grievous gaffe. It’s OK if you disagree, though, Gentle Reader, because having Eric Cantor as the less mendacious, unethical, incompetent jackass in a scenario takes a little getting used to. But what’s really troubling is that whether the debt and deficit are actual crises, they’re certainly concerns, and the people we’ve got on the job to fix them are folks like these two.

We’re fucked.

Another "I hate being right" moment.

There are times when I hate being right. One such occasion would be when I wrote here before the beginning of the NCAA basketball tournament that Northern Iowa was “a legitimate 5-seed, and they got jobbed. (So, of course, did KU, by potentially having to face a team a whole lot better than a 9-seed in the second round.)” Still, when you get only 2 fast-break points because the other team is sending only one guy to the boards with everybody else getting back on defense and you still give up 18 second-chance points, when you have a 3:5 assist to turnover ratio (and your All-American wannabe point guard is 4:5), when your two starting guards are a combined 0-for-11 from beyond the arc… well, you’re likely to lose because you stunk up the joint, not because the other team was good or even lucky (and UNI was both).

But, much as I love the Jayhawks, it bothers me considerably more that I was right, too, when I wrote this: “while the first few years of this millennium certainly demonstrated that the Republicans are horrible at governance, they did study long enough at the Karl Rove School of Outrageous Prevarication and Political Slimeballitude to get pretty good at … playing to the simmering racial animus that motivates much of their base.” Today’s headlines, coming as they do on the 45th anniversary of the third Selma to Montgomery march organized and led by Martin Luther King, are chilling. MSNBC’s description of an “Ugly build-up to House health care vote” doesn’t begin to tell the story. The New York Times comes, perhaps, a little closer: “Spitting and Slurs Directed at Lawmakers.” Disturbingly, grotesquely, horrifically, anti-health care reform activists have chanted “nigger” at Representatives Clyburn and Lewis and “faggot” at Representative Frank.

Yes, our friends in the Tea Party movement have decided that being inordinately proud of their ignorance and boorishness is no longer sufficient. Nor is it apparently any longer to their advantage to concentrate all their animosity on President Obama. I wish I could say that this is because they recognized that the President has shown precious little (apparent) leadership on the health-care debate, and that the bill that is coming up for a vote in the House reminds one of the famous saying that a camel is a horse designed by a committee. No, they have simply decided that it was too much trouble suppressing their hatred for anything and anyone who is the slightest bit different from them: in terms of race, religion, sexual orientation, whatever.

This is a movement encapsulated by the words of second-rate actor and first-rate moron Craig T. Nelson: “I've been on food stamps and welfare. Did anyone help me out? No.” This is the crowd that got a Democrat elected in an upstate New York district whose last non-Republican representative had been a Whig: and yet the Republican leadership embraced them, embraced their utter disregard for reason, embraced their comparison of the President of the United States to Hitler, embraced their total ignorance of and/or disregard for the most basic provisions of the reform proposals, embraced their taunting of ill or disabled citizens who just want a system that cares at least almost as much about them as about corporate profits. And now… “oh, my goodness, we certainly don’t condone that kind of behavior.” Actually, no, you don’t condone getting caught.

Even as the most loony of the right argue that nothing happened (and that if it did, it was socialist "plants" who did the deed), leading Congressional Republicans like John Boehner and Eric Cantor are tsk-tsking while, of course, denying that the actions of the few are in any way indicative of the feelings of the many. Needless to say, the party that claims to value personal responsibility denies any role in creating and perpetuating an environment in which this kind of mob-driven ugliness can thrive.

When Democratic Representative John Larson suggested that it might be time to “ratchet back just a little bit,” Cantor responded, “you know what it is time for? It's time to listen to the American people, and that is the stunning thing about this.” Would that be the American people who support the public option and think the current bill doesn’t go far enough, sir? Oh, wait, majorities don’t matter. Not the majority who elected President Obama, not the majority who elected a significant majority of Democrats to both houses of Congress. Not in this Brave New World in which corporations have personhood. The only majority you care about, Mr. Cantor, is who contributes the majority of the money to your campaign coffers. And it takes a lot of $20 contributions to match what you pull in from the health care industry: over $594,000 from insurance companies, health professionals, pharmaceutical companies, and HMOs, nearly half a million dollars ($488,700, or about 82% of the total) of which came from PACs instead of individuals, just in the last election. Mr. Cantor, if I were to guess your principal allegiances as a Congressman, the people of your district would be lucky to crack the top 10.

Just in case you cared, though—in a moment of weakness, perhaps—here are the responses to two questions posed to voters in your home state of Virginia (home of Real Americans) by the reputable pollsters Research 2000:

“What would make you more likely to vote for Democrats in the 2010 elections: If they pass health care reform that includes a public health insurance option but gets zero Republican votes OR if they pass health care reform without a public option but with some Republican votes?” 55% prefer the former, 33% the latter.

“Would you favor or oppose the national government offering everyone the choice of buying into a government administered health insurance plan -- something like the Medicare coverage that people 65 and older get -- that would compete with private health insurance plans?” 61% approve, 32% disapprove. Oh, by the way, it’s a little more emphatic still (62-30) among independents. “Listen to the American people,” indeed.

Like most of Congress (both parties), no doubt, I haven’t read the legislation in its entirety. Assuming the news media are doing their job even a little bit, however, I have a pretty good idea what is and isn’t there. To be honest, I fear the bill may have been so eviscerated that it might end up as a net loss. But I’m guided by two things: the conversion of Dennis Kucinich, and the rhetoric of the opposition. If the Republicans can’t muster a better argument against this bill than that it’s socialist (it clearly isn’t) or that the American people think it goes too far (they clearly don’t), then my temptation would be to hold my nose and vote for it.

But, if nothing else, this debate has taught us a lot. Unfortunately, one thing we’ve learned is that overt, pervasive, racism in this country didn’t disappear when some of us imagined that it did. The election of an African-American President wasn’t, as we hoped, the signal of a new era, but the catalyst for a trip back in time to a darker age. The wound we thought was healed had merely scabbed over, and there was some nasty, gangrenous pus underneath. I say that “we” were fooled. I should clarify: the Republican leadership and their corporate masters knew all along. That’s what they’ve been counting on.