As an addendum to last night’s post on David Brooks misguided op-ed, Ezra Klein and Ryan Avent point out that contrary to this sentiment:
“in times like these, deficit spending to pump up the economy doesn’t make consumers feel more confident; it makes them feel more insecure because they see a political system out of control.”
Consumer confidence is actually at an all time high. I really liked how Ezra Klein put it:
Now, it may be that the deficit itself scares people even as the deficit-driven economic recovery is making them confident. But that just goes to the question of whether you’d prefer to have people worried about a deficit that’s actually not a major problem or an unnecessarily deep recession that actually is a major problem.
This gets back to what I said last night – do we worry about some phantom fears of deficit or turn our attention to quantifiable worries?