I find something infuriating about the idea that “deficit reduction” is the big selling point of the health care law. How about are our premiums going to be less? Will meds be cheaper? Is government using its power to end price gouging? No, of course not. The good news is the government will be “off my back” (providing less service) but will be retained as leg breaker/bill collector for the medical cartel. And deficit reduction, assuming this is the actual result, benefits me how?

To echo Selise’s point, Dean Baker had a pretty good debunking of Clintonomics today.

If the country has a trade deficit, then it absolutely must have negative national savings. (This is an accounting identity, it has to be true.) Negative national savings means that we must have either large government budget deficits or very low private savings, as was the case at the peak of the housing bubble, when the savings rate hit zero.

The phrasing “Clinton left us a surplus and Bush blew a hole in the deficit” has become sort of a stock in trade in the progressive media. Unfortunately, it has little substantive meaning and only tends to reinforce widely circulated fallacies about money. A budget surplus is not like a piggy bank that someone could blow a hole in and have the money fall out. The government “saving” its own money makes no more sense than Newcastle importing coal.

When we say that “the sun rises” every schoolgirl knows that it is only a manner of speaking and that the apparent motion of the sun is due to the earth’s rotation. Unfortunately, most people don’t know the basic facts about money so it would be better if we could avoid phrases that reinforce the common shibboleths.

It’s good to see you back here, Selise. Mostly because of you I’ve been studying MMT for, what, a couple of years now. It is liberating to know that our problems aren’t really financial, although knowing that doesn’t make the political obstacles any less immense.

To add to the syllabus here’s an oldie but goodie from William Vickrey:

We Need a Bigger “Deficit”

Unemployment also can’t by definition exist until the baseline wage is zero. Otherwise, we’re just talking about greedy, insufficiently motivated parasites.

Obama must mend the rift with “the business community.” That’s what they told him and what the mid-term elections supposedly proved. So he’s running with it.

Well, you’re right about one thing. The right will use it, baseless though it may be. Engineering a right wing backlash to a left wing straw-man is by now a hoary institution in the GOP. Gingrich’s one talent has always been his ability to suss out/invent and promote quasi-moral, legal or historical arguments for such straw-men. Even if they can’t get the political traction for impeachment, they’ll use it to raise money in religious right circles and will add it to their list of “get backs” when they have the presidency again.

If Romney’s too Mormon to be president the answer is Huntsman?

Any framing of the health care debate around “deficit reduction” is only self defeating for progressives. I didn’t trust it when Obama was using it for the simple reason that when they talk about deficit reduction all they are talking about is reducing the level of government commitment to a public concern. It says nothing about the costs or quality of services one will receive in the coerced private “market.”

Please talk about the overall societal benefits of single payer which would in fact be considerable. Even if it resulted in a higher deficit temporarily or permanently, so what? It would markedly improve our national economic health and couldn’t help but improve our national health.

Interesting points.

The LIBERAL argument against big government is that it redistributes wealth from the many to the politically connected few.

This stands out for me and reminds me of the first time I heard from a conservative that the reason they didn’t like George Bush was because he was “a socialist.” I almost laughed in the guy’s face at the time, but the more I thought about it the more I saw that maybe the “socialism” he was referring to was Medicare part D, “No Child Left Behind” and other such corporate welfare boondoggles. I hated those things too but it would have never occured to me to call them even liberal let alone socialist. Most people nowadays don’t get the difference between an effective government program like Social Security and a corporate boondoggle like Obamacare.

The sad fact is that “big government” could fix our main problems fairly easily if the politicians and the majority of the populace could get a grip on what government actually could and should be doing.

I won’t take issue with your assertion of fascism at this time but I really think that a big part of the problem is that we have simply lost the vocabulary to even discuss the proper role of government. If you were to argue that that situation was deliberately engineered as well I probably wouldn’t disagree much.

That’s probably true, but change does happen. For example, in Denmark, in the 18th and 19th century, some of the privileged people began to realize that the feudal system wasn’t working for the country as a whole and began initiating reforms, at first quite modest, that eventually transformed their country into a modern democracy. I agree that our elites aren’t close to such a realization.