The budget ballet

Want to Fix the Deficit? Get Real

By Ezra Klein - Mar 11, 2013, Bloomberg

This week marks the beginning of the U.S. budget season. Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin will present the budget for House Republicans. Senator Patty Murray of Washington will, for the first time since 2009, present a budget on behalf of Senate Democrats. In a few weeks, the Barack Obama administration will publish its own budget. In honor of the occasion, Americans everywhere will wear traditional budget-season hats and eat the customary budget-season meals, which include, of course, a rich dessert that we assume will be offset by future weight loss.

OK, that last part is just what we do in my house.

Behind all these appendix-heavy documents lurks the specter of our budget deficits, which have emerged as pretty much the only problem in Washington that both parties can agree to focus on (sorry, millions of jobless Americans). But what kind of problem, exactly, do our budget deficits present? Here are three ways to think about them:

1. We’re experiencing severe and measurable economic drag from today’s deficits.

2. We’re not experiencing measurable economic drag from today’s deficits, but we’re worried about future deficits implied by today’s policies and demographic trends.

3. We’re not experiencing severe and measurable economic drag from today’s deficits, but we’re worried about future deficits implied by today’s policies and demographic trends, and we’re also concerned about the likelihood of additional budget-busting policies that some future Congress might pursue.

(More here.)