Baseball Crank: POLITICS: The Health of the State

February 18, 2004

POLITICS: The Health of the State

Josh Marshall makes a revealing blunder all too typical of Beltway Democrats:

Bush told a crowd in Florida that "Democrats would endanger America's fiscal health by raising taxes." . . . When the president came into office the budget surplus was over $200 billion. Now the deficit is over $500 billion.
Even my frail grasp of mathematics tells me that's a deterioration in the nation's fiscal health of roughly three-quarters of a trillion dollars in the three years he's been in office. And for almost all of that time the president's party controlled both houses of congress.

And he says the Democrats are a danger to the nation's fiscal health?

Note that Marshall equates "the nation's fiscal health" with the Federal Government's budget. Now, maybe he's deliberately turning Bush's use of the word "fiscal" against him, but the bottom line here is that Marshall completely ignores the existence of an economy outside of the government. Balanced budgets alone are not the health of the state.

Posted by Baseball Crank at 07:06 AM | Politics 2004 | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

Comments

Good catch, but in Marshall's world (which is Blumenthal's world), the government is the only entity.

Posted by: Ricky at February 18, 2004 10:47 PM

"War in the health of the state."
- Randolph Bourne

A lot of our current national problems can be attributed to the expansion of the "welfare-warfare" state. Unfortunately, the policies of the neoliberals and neoconservatives, whose advice our president has unfortunately decided to take, have been making these problems worse. We need to turn things around... And fast.

Posted by: Aakash at February 18, 2004 11:54 PM

I often have issues with Josh but I think you are taking that comment a little out of context. I think that if you look at Josh's overall posts you'll see that he doesn't confuse the government with the total economy. And I think in this state he means to say the nation-state instead of the more common usage for nation as referring to everything and everyone in it.

That said, it would be a mistake not to realize how important government spending and fiscal management is to the the nation's fiscal health. Government spending has been key to weathering recessions before and poor fiscal management in our government has helped create recessions in the past.

Posted by: seamus at February 20, 2004 11:24 AM