April 19, 2015
According to inside reports, the main reason the Washington Post opposes nuclear war is because of its impact on the budget deficit. The paper’s never ending obsession with the budget deficit, even as it is clear that we have been suffering from a deficit that is too small, is a testament to the ability of people to ignore reality.
Ruth Marcus treated us to another example of this obsession when she warned of a restructuring of Medicare payments that comes at the cost of:
“a whopping half-a-trillion dollars over the next 20 years… .”
A bit of context might be helpful here. While none of us will see a half trillion dollars in our lifetime, the federal government will see considerably more than this over the next twenty years.
The Congressional Budget Office projects GDP will be more than $550 trillion over the next two decades, making this whopping sum less than 0.1 percent of GDP over this period. Federal revenue will be roughly $100 trillion so this comes to around half of one percent of projected revenue. That’s hardly trivial, but if it’s “whopping,” then whopping ain’t what it used to be.
It is also worth noting that if Ruth Marcus and the Washington Post are really concerned about budget deficits, they could support more expansionary policy from the Fed. In addition to giving millions of workers jobs and tens of millions the bargaining power they need to get pay increases, lower unemployment due to expansionary Fed policy can easily knock $2 trillion off the size of the deficit over the next decade. That’s four times “whopping.” (It could also support trade policy that reduces health care costs by exposing doctors to international competition and weakens patent protection for drugs.)
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