Marc Ambinder highlights a number of Obama’s domestic policy weaknesses going into the debate, and he makes some good points and raises some good questions. But then he says this:
I don’t think there’s much Obama can do to create jobs in his second term. I don’t think Obama thinks he can create jobs without a major bipartisan deficit reduction plan already in place.
Unless there’s some kind of 12-D chess going on here (If I have deficit reduction, congress will let me do things again) then this is nuts. A “bipartisan deficit reduction plan” has nothing to do with jobs. It won’t help to create them. In fact, it will eliminate more of them! The main problem in our economy today, right now, is a lack of demand. Decreasing demand further cannot possibly help.
If Ambinder is right and Obama truly does think that we can’t have jobs until we reduce the deficit, that’s pretty fucking terrifying. The fetishization of “bipartisan deficit reduction plans” ever since The BS Commission (oops, I used the impolite acronym) has been, to my mind, one of the biggest disasters to unfold in Washington over the past couple years. Yglesias summed it up rather well:
a very large share of the older cohort of political pundits is much too lazy and innumerate to be bothered to actually read the content of different policy proposals. The fact that Simpson-Bowles is a “bipartisan deficit reduction plan” makes it very appealing to them.
Deficits are bad and bipartisan is good, and so nothing else matters.
But all of the effort and political capital dedicated to all of these failed bipartisan plans and grand bargains has gotten us exactly nothing, and meanwhile millions of unemployed folks get closer and closer to being completely unemployable at all. Real people are needlessly immiserated because Washington has spent years listening to deficit scolds, and ingnoring unemployment entirely. Even if you think that there’s not much that can be done about unemployment, just tossing up your hands and saying “fuck it” is just not acceptable.
The issue of deficits / debt is simply not a serious one right now, unemployment really is. Yes, we will need to do something to control the deficit / debt in the future. Returning to full employment will go a long way towards that, and in the meantime we need to deal with our immediate problems before we move on to our hypothetical future ones. The only real problem that the deficit creates in the economy today is that it distracts policymakers from doing other things, lest they be labelled as “not serious” by all the Very Serious People.
520 Chestnut 
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