One aspect of the whole Eason Jordan affair that is bouncing around the blogosphere that has gone unremarked is the fact that two people who continue to corroborate the worst version of Jordan’s remarks are two certified world-class liberals, Barney Frank and Chris Dodd. This suggests that Jordan’s remarks really were egregious and beyond the pale, though of course the wimpy David Gergen could be relied upon to gloss everything over. (Gergen’s role in this sent me scurrying for Michael Kelly’s wonderful description of Gergen back in 1993: "To be Gergenized is to be spun by the velveteen hum of this soothing man’s smoothing voice into a state of such vertigo that the sense of what is real disappears into a blur." Michael, do we ever miss you.)
If one ponders the Frank-Dodd resolution and forthrightness in this matter, it is possible that what we are seeing here is a couple of very smart Democrats recognizing when it is politically smart to stand up and defend America’s military from scurrilous attack. In other words, maybe Frank and Dodd have absorbed the election returns.
A second such indicator came during Treasury Secretary Snow’s testimony about the budget yesterday in the House. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (who once asked NASA if th Mars Rover could find the spot where our astronauts landed in in 1969) said Social Security could be saved simply by raising taxes on the very rich. Suddenly Charlie Wrangel intervened to disavow Lee, and say that such an idea was not (yet) the policy of the Democratic Party.
Who says these guys will never learn?
Isn’t deficit spending a form of hidden taxation?
Yes, but. . . If nothing is done with Social Security, we’ll have to borrow something like $27 trillion dollars eventually. If we do the Bush plan, we’ll have to borrow something like $8 trillion to finance the transition, after which the program will be sound for good. So, which loan do you want to take out: $8 trillion or $27 trillion? This looks like a no-brainer to me.
Also, as we know from the Reagan years, federal borrowing causes less distortion to the economy than higher taxes, so in the end the answer is mostly No, a deficit is not the equivalent of hidden taxation.