The Contrarian Michael Kinsley awakens from a long domancy and writes a terrific column for The Atlantic asking an obvious question: Why aren’t more reputable economists scared to death of a new bout of inflation? Not just the low, double-digit variety of the late 1970s/early 1980s, but Banana Republic-style hyperinflation?
My specific concern is nothing original: it?s just the national debt.
Yawn and turn the page here if you?d like. We talk now of trillions,
not yesterday?s hundreds of billions. It?s not Obama?s fault. He did
what he had to do. However, Obama is president, and Democrats do control
Congress. So it?s their responsibility, even if it?s not their fault.
And no one in a position to act has proposed a realistic way out of this
debt, not even in theory. The Republicans haven?t. The Obama
administration hasn?t. Come to think of it, even Paul Krugman hasn?t.
Presidential adviser David Axelrod, writing in The Washington Post,
says that Obama has instructed his agency heads to go through the
budget ?page by page, line by line, to eliminate what we don?t need to
help pay for what we do.? So they?ve had more than a year and haven?t
yet discovered the line in the budget reading ?Stuff We Don?t Need, $3.2
trillion.?There is a way out. It?s called inflation.
Kinsley’s not calling for it, mind you. He simply acknowledges that it’s the politically easy thing to do (rather than cut spending or raise taxes). And that there’s not much of a backbone in Washington these days.
