On Friday, the Government reported its 2010 Fiscal Year results. Here are some fragments from a “news” article in WaPo by Vincent Del Giudice.

The U.S. government posted its second straight annual budget deficit in excess of $1 trillion as lingering unemployment constrained tax revenue.

The shortfall totaled $1.294 trillion in the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, second only to the $1.416 trillion deficit in 2009, the Treasury Department said today in Washington. . . .

It’s been nearly 35 years since we’ve had a “tax and spend” political party. During the 1970s, the Democrats gave up fighting the Republicans about the “tax and spend” label, and the Carter Administration tried to escape from that charge by making very serious attempts to balance the budget. During the 1980s, more and more Democrats emphasized their concern for reducing deficits and balancing budgets as a way of distinguishing themselves from the Reagan Administration’s unprecedented peacetime deficits. This didn’t work for them during Reagan’s time, but they finally were able to use the balanced budget old-time religion game to get George Bush to violate his no new taxes pledge, which both contributed to the Bush recession and, as a further consequence, was a big reason why Bill Clinton was elected.

Earlier this month, Thomas Geoghegan wrote a piece for The Nation telling the Democrats the ten things they could do to really get the base excited, and at the same time do good things for the country. Here’s his list.

Orszag’s maiden voyage at the New York Times entitled “One Nation, Two Deficits,” is full of myths, and that’s the polite way to say it. I’ll review these and comment on each of them one-by-one.

Professor L. Randall Wray of the Department of Economics, University of Missouri, Kansas City is one of the leaders of the Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) approach to economics. His blogs are very clearly and simply written, well-organized, thorough, and generally fairly dispassionate. But the recent attack of the right on Fannie and Freddy really blew his gasket, and he responded with a really passionate rant against all the present attempts by the righties to impoverish the middle class, the old, the young, and generally everyone else except the rich in a post entitled: “The Wingnuts Go After Fannie and Freddy.”

Laurence Kotlikoff has been making waves by using “inter-generational accounting” and CBO and IMF data, to compute a fiscal gap of $202 Trillion in present value. He concludes that this gap shows that the US is “bankrupt” as of now. Evidently, publications like Bloomberg take this sort of thing seriously since they publish it. But Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) economists, think it’s nonsense, due to the inapplicability of inter-generational accounting to Governments sovereign in their own currency.

Mike Norman, an MMT economist with a very good blog, got the chance to comment on Kotlikoff’s views, and also some nonsense of Tim Geither’s and President Obama’s, at RT.com.

Paul Krugman got a lot of attention among leftward tweeters today for following Glenn Greenwald down the road of writing about the de-evolution of the United States into a de-developed nation, because of the irresponsible preference of its ruling elite for lower taxes rather than infrastructure and essential services, and also because of impact of a generation of fantasy anti-government rhetoric on American minds. Again, I was happy to see Paul take this issue up, but would have been much happier if he done so with, perhaps, a little more fire, and a little more insistence on what the Government ought to be doing, and why we need not, ever, worry about deficits in the abstract.

The Washington Post editorial page has been one of the primary MSM outlets for aggressive deficit terrorism. There is an axis of deficit terrorism in Washington DC today. It runs from Hooverite Republicans such as Judd Gregg and Mike Spence, to Blue Dog Democrats like Evan Bayh and Kent Conrad, to media organizations like CNN, WaPo, and the Peter G. Peterson funded The Fiscal Times, to foundations like The Peter G. Peterson Foundation, and Peterson-funded think tanks like AmericaSpeaks, to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), to high-level Administration people like OMB Director designate Jack Lew, and judging by his speech and actions, to Barack Obama himself. This axis has been laying down a carpet of continuous propaganda for many months now distracting attention from the immediate problem of getting people back to work, and toward doing something about an assumed long-term problem, that some argue is fictional, and that many others think may, but, will most probably not, occur

Last Saturday, the WaPo added to its place in progressive infamy with an editorial that managed, in a few short paragraphs, to repeat many of the false arguments the deficit terrorists use to scare Americans into thinking that we really have to cut Government spending as soon as we can or we will be facing unbearable suffering in future years. This post will review that editorial in detail. It begins:

After reviewing the terrible state of our economy and the need to reconstruct it so that people can find work and a vibrant middle class can be rebuilt, Bob Borosage suggests that Congress go back to first principles. he briefly reviews the post- WWII history of employment legislation and says:

That debate was revisited in the 1978 Humphrey Hawkins Full Employment Act, which initially sought to revive the mandate to full employment, and the right to a job. In the end, it too was diluted, offering five ultimate goals: full employment, growth in production, price stability, balance of trade and balanced budgets. It was this act that gave the Federal Reserve the dual mandate of pursing both full employment and price stability. Needless to say, over the last decade, the goals were distorted in practice, with price stability becoming primary, while trade deficits soared, manufacturing was shipped overseas, and budget deficits rose — before the collapse.

MISSION:
To deploy an army of MMT proponents to respond to deficit terrorism on the web.
Go to offending articles. Neutralize flaws. Report back to home base.

MERIT AWARDS:
An MMT heart (♥) will be awarded for each successful strike.