Arithmophobia

I’m still waiting to meet someone unemployed who is more worried about federal deficits than his or her own family’s. But to hear the Beltway punditocracy tell it, deficits are all we should care about.

Chris Hayes comments on a Politico piece at The Nation:

There’s one big maddening conceptual error at the heart of this piece (whether committed in good faith or bad I can’t say) which is to confuse relatively substantial pieces of domestic legislation with a spending “binge.” See, a government, like any organization, institution, or firm has expenditures and revenues. Miraculously, it can increase its expenditures, without increasing its deficit, if it also increases its revenues. This is called “deficit neutral” and it’s what the current health care bill, in all its incarnations, is.

But don’t confuse them with all those elitist, three- and four-syllable words. Government that is B-I-G is government that is B-A-D. And lawdy, what are they thinking, talking about passing deficit-neutral bills in a time of high deficits? Deficit-neutral has “deficit” right there in its name! Hayes continues:

You may object to government doing the things it’s doing. You may think the working poor should just suck it up when they get sick, or that we should subject Bangladesh to a horrific future in which it is plunged into the sea, but you can’t say that the motivation for your objection is accounting.

Of course, you can. All those zeroes. Numbers that are B-I-G are numbers that are B-A-D.

Arithmophobia.

[h/t Digby]