Why We Don't 'Owe It To Ourselves'

[Geee]

American Spectator:

Since the incomparable William F. Buckley, Jr., has already dealt with this subject in 1958, I defer to his inimitable style in introducing the subject of today's column:

Halfway through the second term of Franklin Roosevelt, the New Deal braintrusters began to worry about mounting popular concern over the national debt.… Indeed, Franklin Roosevelt had talked himself into office, in 1932, in part by promising to hack away at a debt which, even under the frugal Mr. Hoover, the people tended to think of as grown to menacing size.… And then, suddenly, the academic community came to the rescue. Economists across the length and breadth of the land were electrified by a theory of debt introduced in England by John Maynard Keynes. The politicians wrung their hands in gratitude. Depicting the intoxicating political consequences of Lord Keynes's discovery, the wry cartoonist of the Washington Times Herald drew a memorable picture. In the center, sitting on a throne in front of a maypole, was a jubilant FDR, cigarette tilted up almost vertically, a grin on his face that stretched from ear to ear. Dancing about him in a circle, hands clasped together, their faces glowing with ecstasy, the braintrusters, vested in academic robes, sang the magical incantation, the great discovery of Lord Keynes: "We owe it to ourselves."

With five talismanic words, the planners had disposed of the problem of deficit spending…. Tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect…

After being pinned to the wall in such eloquent fashion like a rare butterfly, you would think the conceit that "We owe the national debt to ourselves" would have been long retired to some museum of rhetorical antiquities. But no, we find that even today the doctrine is still vigorously alive, at least in the mind of Paul Krugman, the lunatic columnist of the New York Times who has just published another 300-page volume that can be digested into three words: "Spend, spend, spend" -- the government, that is.

I admit I stopped reading Krugman a long time ago. You can only listen to a one-track mind for so long before it loses any further informational value. It all reminds me of the scene in Woody Allen's Take the Money and Run where Virgil Starkwell, the inept career bank robber, drops a rock on the foot of a prison guard and is "locked in solitary confinement for a week with an insurance salesman" whom we last see disappearing into the hole with Woody propounding, "Now you're gonna need life. I think term would be best. Then we're going to want to cover you for accidents.…" That's what Paul Krugman sound like.