Exposing Republican hypocrisy on the US national debt ("I used to be a spendthrift, but on Jan 20, 2009 I became a deficit hawk") is necessary, as this Bloomberg News article does.
House Speaker John Boehner often attacks the spendthrift ways of Washington.... Yet the speaker, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell all voted for major drivers of the nation’s debt during the past decade: Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts and Medicare prescription drug benefits. They also voted for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, that rescued financial institutions and the auto industry.
But it's not sufficient. Now IANAPE (I am not a philosopher of economics, like Eric is) but a standard Keynesian perspective tells me you have to take the business cycle into account when talking about government deficit spending. Or in other words, deficit spending in a recession aiming at stimulus has to be thematized as qualitatively different and can't just be seen as quantitative change in a homogenous "national debt," as does the article.
Rank-and-file Republicans are eager to pin the blame on Democrats, frequently pointing to the economic stimulus signed by Obama in 2009. The total cost of the stimulus will be $830 billion by 2019, according to a May 2011 Congressional Budget Office report. That’s half the cost of the Bush tax cuts and less than two-thirds of what has been spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A qualitative / timing distinction w/r/t deficit spending for stimulus purposes is what's missing from the Bloomberg article, as important as it is to expose the Republicans for the Bush-era dealings.
Of course, even distinguishing the qualitative difference of deficit spending for stimulus effect leaves aside the even more important argument that the federal stimulus was too small, because offset by state cuts.
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