“Balanced budgets goood! Budget deficits baaad!” That’s a reference to Phil Hartman’s Frankenstein, which is itself a reference to Frankenstein (or perhaps more accurately Young Frankenstein). It implies a gut reaction to things — not a considered intellectual opinion. It’s great fun in the films and parodies, even if it is rather the opposite of what is going on in the book. But what bothers me is that supposed serious political analysts don’t usually have any more depth of thought, “Balanced budgets goood! Budget deficits baaad!”

That brings us to Fred Hiatt who is upset that the federal government isn’t balancing its budget, but he’s very happy about something, One Governor Bucking the Bipartisan Tradition of Passing the Buck. It is such a load of Villager idiocy that I’m not going to even go into it. It’s filled with the usual “Both sides do it!” nonsense, even though the Republicans are responsible for everything he’s actually complaining about in the budget that Congress just passed. He’s also on about “unaffordable pensions” for public sector workers. I wonder what Mr Hiatt would think if someone came in and told him the pension he negotiated with The Washington Post 34 years ago is “unaffordable” and will have to be cut.

What’s absurd is that Hiatt compares the state and federal governments as though they are comparable. States have to maintain more or less balanced budgets; governments with their own currency (like our federal government) do not. Given that, you might wonder why everyone makes such a big deal out of balanced budgets. And the truth is, the times when we ought to worry about them are exactly the times when people like Fred Hiatt don’t worry about them.

Think back to glory days of the late Clinton administration. We had a budget surplus! And everyone of Fred Hiatt’s caliber of analysis thinks it is because we cut spending and raised taxes. But that was a very small part of it. In fact, although these policy changes would have decreased the deficit, they wouldn’t have come close to balancing the budget. What did it was the roaring economy, which brought in loads more in taxes from people who didn’t only got jobs, they god raises for the only time in the last four decades.

Had we not had a surplus at that time, it would have been an excellent time to get one. Because that’s the only time it matters to have a balanced budget: when the economy is strong. The reason is because the economy is working at peak efficiency. Businesses want to borrow money to invest. If the government is also borrowing money, the cost of loans goes up. That’s really the whole story. Budget deficits are bad for the economy when there is great demand from the private sector for loans.

Is that the case now? No! Right now, the federal government can borrow money with 10-year treasury notes for 2.24%. The lowest this number ever was during the Clinton administration was 4.44%. And most of the time it was close to 6%. What this tells us is that the economy is performing poorly. The private sector is not interested in borrowing money. So if the government weren’t borrowing it, it would just be sitting there, doing nothing.

And that’s what Fred Hiatt wants. Dean Baker is always good at stabbing right at the heart of the matter, and his response was, Washington Post Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt Pushes for Higher Unemployment. That’s what’s so annoying about the way we talk about economics in this country. It’s all about budget deficits and interest rates. These all sound like no-brainers — or at least morally neutral. But for Very Serious People like Fred Hiatt, the policies they push just happen to always mean that regular Americans have static wages — when they have jobs at all.

See Also

Very Serious Conspiracy Theorists
Fred Hiatt’s Circuitous False Equivalence

At The Washington Post last week, Radley Balko wrote a great article, In the end, 2015 Saw No “War on Cops” and No “National Crime Wave.” As he noted, this was supposed to be because of all the supposed anti-cop rhetoric and so on. But the data are in and it shows that there is no spike in violence against the police. In fact, the numbers from this year continue the downward trend of police fatalities that started in the mid-1970s. It is safer to be a police offer than it has been in well over a century.

But think about that supposed anti-cop rhetoric. I don’t recall any anti-cop rhetoric. Every person of any power who was critical of policing always went far out of their way to say that most officers were great at their jobs. This is at best an exaggeration. But the fact that everyone felt the need to continue to lick the boots of law enforcement shows just how much power and inexplicable goodwill that people have for the police. It was only the police unions and other advocates who equated criticism of systemic problems and individual officers with attacks on the police generally.

As for crime, well, that too is down. We have some statistics via Law Enforcement Leaders to Reduce Crime (pdf). It is “a group of 150 of the country’s most prominent current and former police chiefs, sheriffs, district and state’s attorneys, US Attorneys, attorneys general, and other law enforcement leaders…” And they reported:

Remember back to why crime was supposedly spiking: police officers were not doing their jobs because they were vewy vewy awraid. So if crime had increased, wouldn’t that have been the fault of the police? Shouldn’t we have reacted badly toward them and not their critics? After all, don’t we have to sit through their royal-like funerals because their jobs are just so dangerous? Isn’t this why we must be now and forever on hands and knees licking their boots? I understand their whining; I’d hate to be a police officer. But I don’t see why the rest of us should put up with the whining. Policing is one of the few good-paying jobs left in America that someone can get with only a high school education.

Despite the fact that violent crime is low and getting lower, Americans think that it was up this year. I think we know why this is. The whining of police officers has an effect. But it’s strange that we put up with it. Would we ever accept teachers going around whining that students were really stupid and that’s why they weren’t doing their jobs? No, we’d tell them to shut up. But since it is the police, it’s somehow acceptable. So in addition to doing at best a mediocre job, the police are spreading lies and fear.

As Radley Balko concluded, “It’s one thing to give in to fear when crime really is on the rise. But it would be tragic if the opportunity we have today to reform laws was thwarted by [this] sort of fact-free fear.”

Stephen Glass is back in the news. In the upcoming issue of Harper’s Magazine, they are running a letter from him and have issued a retraction about an article he wrote for them all the way back in 1998. For those who don’t know, Glass was a writer at New Republic in the mid to late 1990s. He was something of a star — publishing many remarkable and amusing stories. The problem was that he was just making stuff up — in some cases, entire articles. But it is coming up on two decades now and Glass is still running around making amends.

The article in question is, “Prophets and Losses.” In it, Glass supposedly went to work for a telephone psychic outfit. By the calculations of the Harper’s Magazine editors: “at least 5,647 of the 7,902 words… were based on fabrications.” That’s pretty amazing. At the same time, as a writer, I appreciate that he was actually writing. The question is whether such writing would have been published had it not been “true.” And the answer to that is pretty clearly that it wouldn’t have been. People accept much less interesting stories if they are supposedly true. Just look at The Blair Witch Project, which never would have been a hit without the cover story of it being real. It just isn’t that interesting and has a totally boring denouement.

But I still think it is pretty bad that Stephen Glass is still trying to piece his life back together. The same goes for Jayson Blair, although I don’t know what he’s up to. In Glass’ case, he’s trying to become a lawyer, but the state of California thinks he can’t be trusted to be a lawyer because of all the made-up stories he published. It’s kind of amusing really. I mean, a lawyer?! He wants to be part of a profession where creating plausible but false stories is critical.

Michael Hiltzik at The Los Angeles Times noted last week that there is much to dislike about Glass. In particular, “His imaginary characters are lower-class, often minority figures, depicted as credulous and uneducated, sometimes speaking in dialect.” But that brings up the broader issue of why it was that Stephen Glass was such a hot commodity while he lasted. As Hiltzik put it, “Glass played on his bosses’ prejudices…” So the question is: if his bosses at New Republic had such a classist take on the work, do we really think that the lawyers of California do not?

My interest is not in Stephen Glass. He’s from a privileged background. Even with all his baggage, and without license to practice law, he finds himself with the impressive sounding position at Director of Special Projects at a big-time law firm. But the treatment of him is typical of the way we treat people who have made mistakes in the past. We are not a forgiving society. There is a binary nature to our attitudes, where people are all good or all bad. And that just isn’t the case. People are all grey, as far as the eye can see.

But for most people without the resources of Stephen Glass, life is effectively over after a drug felony. These are the people who I fret over. And as a society, I think we really need to decide when we are going get over past wrongs. In Stephen Glass’ case, his great wrong was to embarrass a certain economic and intellectual class. I don’t defend what he did. But he’s hardly a murderer — and even they deserve some reconsideration over time. As a society, we need to learn the art of forgiveness.