Joe Conason — What Republicans Hope You Don’t Know and Never Find Out

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, it is Republican voters, misinformed by Fox News, who most fervently and consistently insist on these mistaken ideas, with 85 percent telling pollsters that the deficit has increased. Less than a third of Democrats gave that answer. But nearly 60 percent of independent voters agree with the Republicans on that question, and only 30 percent of Democrats understand the truth—an implicit repudiation, as The Huffington Post noted, of the president’s political decision to prioritize deficit reduction rather than job creation....

But not only is the good news about the shrinking deficit widely ignored; it isn’t actually good news at all. By avoiding a mostly mythical “budget crisis,” federal policy has created a very real jobs crisis that persists, with particular harm to working families. The latest Congressional Budget Office report on the fiscal outlook for the coming decade strongly suggests that the cost of reducing the deficit has been—and will continue to be—substantial losses in potential economic growth and employment.

The ironic consequence, as former White House economist Jared Bernstein recently explained, is that the fiscal outlook for the next 10 years will be somewhat dimmer than expected. In other words, we will return to higher deficits because fiscal austerity—enforced by Republicans and accepted by Obama—is still dragging the economy down. Truthdig

Truthdig

What Republicans Hope You Don’t Know and Never Find Out
Joe Conason