Jonah Goldberg 4/17/09, bravely taking on a list of liberal talking points he heard somewhere:

4. Republicans are hypocrites for suddenly caring about deficits.

Well, maybe. But then so are liberals for suddenly not caring about deficits. (That part always gets left out.)

Touche! Errr.. tu quoque!

Oh those fucking liberals! Damn them and their fucking hypocritical asses!

Jonah Goldberg 3/5/2004

I don't pretend to know a great deal about the deficit either. But here's what I do know:
First, it doesn't matter much politically. As Dick Cheney allegedly said, "Reagan proved deficits don't matter." I say "allegedly" because Cheney denies he said it and the only other source is former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill's book. But whether Cheney said it or not, it's politically true.

Think of it this way, if the economy is doing great then voters don't care about the deficit. If the economy is doing terrible then people don't care about the deficit - they care about jobs, the stock market, property values, etc. The deficit only really seems to matter as a source of an ill-defined anxiety about the future among the relatively well-to-do who really want something grave to worry about. Too bad we won't have another Y2K issue to occupy them until Y3K.

You pathetic well-to-do types and your ill-defined anxiety. Hah! How borrrring! Please, won't somebody rid Jonah of this boring deficit?!

Now, economically, the deficit does matter, though how much and why it matters is the subject of a debate whose intensity is exceeded only by its dullness.

Boring ol deficit. zzz.... how borrrrring. Why do people keep talking about the deficit?

There's a long list of reasons why big government is wrong: A big government is inefficient; it saps individual initiative; it imposes Washington's values on a vast nation of free people; it makes us all employees of the state and so on.

I agree that a big deficit belongs on that list, but not anywhere near the top of it.

...unless there's a Democrat in office.

zzzz