The Hill News

Promoting fears about the budget deficit is a major industry in Washington. The central theme is usually that we have out of control spending which will make us just like Greece in only a few short years. The policy take away from this story is that we have to cut Social Security and Medicare, and the sooner the better. This is just the idea put forth by Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) in a recent piece that appeared here on the Congress Blog.

Everything in this picture is wrong. The basic story of out of control deficits as an ongoing problem is nonsense. While people may have complained about the deficits in the Bush presidency, the debt-to-GDP ratio was actually falling by the end of his administration and was projected to continue to fall for the foreseeable future, even withou! t the ending of the Bush tax cuts.

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