Deficits: the causes matter - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com

Deficits: the causes matter - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com:

Broadly speaking, there are two ways you can get into severe deficits: fundamental irresponsibility, or temporary emergencies. There’s a world of difference between the two.

Consider first the classic temporary emergency — a big war. It’s normal and natural to respond to such an emergency by issuing a lot of debt, then gradually reducing that debt after the emergency is over. And the operative word is “gradually”: it would have been incredibly difficult for the United States to pay off its World War II debt in ten years, which Jim apparently thinks is the right way to view debts incurred more recently; but it was no big deal to stabilize the nominal debt, which is roughly what happened, and as a result gradually reduce debt as a percentage of GDP.

Consider, on the other hand, a government that is running big deficits even though there isn’t an emergency. That’s much more worrisome, because you have to wonder what will change to stop the soaring debt. In such a situation, markets are much more likely to conclude that any given debt is so large that it creates a serious risk of default.

Now, back in 2003 I got very alarmed about the US deficit — wrongly, it turned out — not so much because of its size as because of its origin. We had an administration that was behaving in a deeply irresponsible way. Not only was it cutting taxes in the face of a war, which had never happened before, plus starting up a huge unfunded drug benefit, but it was also clearly following a starve-the-beast budget strategy: tax cuts to reduce the revenue base and force later spending cuts to be determined. In effect, it was a strategy designed to produce a fiscal crisis, so as to provide a reason to dismantle the welfare state. And so I thought the crisis would come.

In fact, it never did. Bond markets figured that America was still America, and that responsibility would eventually return; it’s still not clear whether they were right, but the housing boom also led to a revenue boom, whittling down those Bush deficits.

Compare and contrast the current situation.

Most though not all of our current budget deficit can be viewed as the result of a temporary emergency. Revenue has plunged in the face of the crisis, while there has been an increase in spending largely due to stimulus and bailouts. None of this can be seen as a case of irresponsible policy, nor as a permanent change in policy. It’s more like the financial equivalent of a war — which is why the WWII example is relevant.

So the debt question is what happens when things return to normal: will we be at a level of indebtedness that can’t be handled once the crisis is past?

And the answer is that it depends on the politics. If we have a reasonably responsible government a decade from now, and the bond market believes that we have such a government, the debt burden will be well within the range that can be managed with only modest sacrifice.

OK, that’s a big if. But it’s not a matter of dollars and cents; it’s about whether America is still America.