This morning, Dean Baker responds to yet another know-nothing right wing rant about the deficit, by suggesting we can solve the deficit problem by hiring unemployed college grads to write equally ignorant pieces about the deficit.
But this piece suggests an easy route for dealing with the deficit. Clearly there is a big market for deficit hawks. (I assume that Mr. Ferguson was well-paid for this piece.) It certainly is not difficult to train someone to write this stuff. Suppose that we set up educational programs that will train millions of deficit hawks to write stuff for the Peter Peterson—BBC—Financial Times crew. We split the payments between our former students and the government.
This would be a great win-win-win story. Otherwise unemployed college grads could get good-paying jobs being deficit hawks. Taxpayers would get a cut of their payments, helping to bring down the deficit. And, even Peter Peterson, the BBC, and the Financial Times would gain because they would be able to find deficit hawks who would be every bit as knowledgeable as Niall Ferguson and would work for much less. (We could assure the deficit hawks that our students would not be more knowledgeable because then they probably would not write such dreck.)
There you have it: a plan for compromise and bipartisanship. Do we have a deal?
(via Beat the Press)
Well, this idea will never be adopted, because long term, it actually might make a dent in the deficit. No, there is only one way to make the deficit problem go away, and the Republicans are really, when you listen, being fairly clear about it. We must restore them to power. Then deficits don’t matter, or at least no one talks about them anymore, and really, in this country, isn’t that the same thing? Look at how well we’ve solved the climate change problem.
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