Alan Blinder is a economics and public affairs professor at Princeton. Recently, he got placed in the middle of the argument between Paul Krugman and Joe Scarborough when Scarborough claimed that Blinder was on his side. Blinder didn’t like that much. Yesterday, he wrote a short article in Politico, Morning Joe’s Accuracy Deficit. He says that he and Krugman only disagree about some very minor details.

Blinder claims there are three issues regarding the budget. In the short term, we are already doing too much deficit reduction. In the medium term (10 years), we have already done about what we should do. And in the long term, things are going to be very bad indeed. He is right about all this. The problem is that, like most people (including Krugman at times), when it comes to the long term, he is being deceptive.

In his new book, After the Music Stopped, Blinder claims:

The problem is not that these numbers are wrong. The problem is that if we don’t get our healthcare system under control, funding Medicare will be the least of our problems. Rising healthcare costs will eventually destroy our whole economy if we don’t do something to rein in costs.

There is no reason to talk about long term budget deficits when the problem is long term healthcare costs. All the solutions to this long term budget problem revolve around providing less healthcare. But even doing that will not save the government if healthcare costs keep increasing much faster than inflation. What Blinder ought to say is that we don’t need to think about the budget deficit at all. We need to think about healthcare costs. This is not a government issue, it is an everyone issue.