It'd sure be something if someone who is in a position to make policy were presenting this side of the budget debate in DC. Atrios:
In a rational world, there should be no discussion of the deficit as policy. Team D and Team R would present their competing visions for what the government should spend money on, and where that money should come from. People should understand that modest deficits are never a problem, and that large deficits in recessions are predictable (drop in revenue) and often desired (stabilizers to prevent state budget cuts). We should not be discussing whether we must cut granny's pension to cut the deficit, we should be discussing how big we think granny's pension should be and how we should be funding that pension. Ideally, we'd have one party that thinks we should spend a bit more on things like social safety nets, and do so with more progressive taxation, and one party which thinks we should spend a bit less, and with more regressive taxation, and the voters would have a reasonably clear choice.
Or this, from Richard Eskow. He envisions a world where our elected official recognize that "25 million Americans are unemployed or under-employed," and have read a "recent Celinda Lake poll [which] shows that concern over jobs outweighs deficit concerns by 2 to 1, and that 77% of the public opposes cutting Social Security." In his world, a majority of Senators don't write a letter to the President demanding that make deficit reduction his top priority, but write this:
As the Administration continues to work with Congressional leadership regarding the current prolonged, recession-like situation for many millions of people, we write to inform you that we believe comprehensive unemployment reduction measures are imperative and to ask you to support a broad approach to solving the problem....
Beyond FY2011 decisions, we urge you to engage in a broader discussion about a comprehensive unemployment reduction package. Specifically, we hope that the discussion will include stimulus spending, entitlement increases and tax increases for the wealthiest among us.
Too bad Atrios and Eskow aren't in charge.