Paul Krugman directly addressed this topic last week in his column. Edwards is in agreement with Krugman, as am I. This is an important issue--we should be looking askance at lowering the debt at the expense of everything else.

That was strong, very strong of Edwards.

There comes a point when a pol can't be all things to all people. It's really refreshing to see a Presidential candidate speak plainly, right from the beginning of his run, about which people he won't be all things to.

This man is not afraid. He's taken on McCain, he's said what his priorities are, he's named one big priority of many people (or many pundits, at least) that's not going to be one for him.

I don't know if Edwards is going to be the candidate I ultimately support for the nomination, but he's looking very, very good right now. I'm very glad he's in the race, because his rivals will have to either rise to his level, or reveal their true colors by finding specious reasons to attack him.

We're moving right along, here.

I'll be impressed when he mentions the need to raise taxes on the rich to help pay for all these great ideas. And mentions campaign finance reform so that not everyone who gets elected is a millionaire.

He's already mentioned both items. Edwards supports both public financing of elections and rolling back the Bush tax cuts for the richest Americans.

As someone who thought him a bit of a lightweight last time 'round, I have to say I'm impressed. At this point I'm leaning between Obama and Edwards, and wondering what Gore will do. But I DO like what I'm hearing from Edwards.

I can't really say whether this makes me lean more towards Edwards, as I'm pretty much agnostic between the progressive heartthrobs (Edwards and Obama), but what encourages me even more is that I think this sort of rhetoric helps the democrats as a while regardless of who eventually takes the nomination. Frankly, when Obama, Edwards, and anyone else who cares to jump into the race speak about serious policy issues in positive and substantive ways, it helps the entire Democratic brand, and will hopefully form allegiances not just to the particular candidate but to the progressive movement as well.

He has my vote, totally please with his stance on the issues. And really completely pleased with his including the netroots in his campaign, he is setting the standard for the 2008 campaigns. On record now, John Edwards embraces and values the netroots!

That's a genuinely important admission, and one that very, very few Democrats are willing to make. It's the opposite of Clintonomics, which took deficit reduction as the transcendent priority and, as Robert Reich long regretted, forsook most investment spending.
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Sorry but this is just re-writing history. Perot was the guy who ran on the deficit reduction platforms in 92 and 96, not Clinton.

look here
http://www-tech.mit.edu/V116/N1/clinton.1w.html

WaPo article from February 1996. FY 97 was the first year of his administration when we almost broke even with a surplus in FY 98. Clinton was planning/projecting deficits until after he left office.

"The outline projects the 1997 deficit will be $160.6 billion, up slightly from this year's estimated $154.4 billion shortfall. Beginning in 1998, the president foresees declining red ink until 2002 when he projects a $3.7 billion surplus."

snip

"The plan I propose cuts hundreds of programs, continues our efforts to downsize the government, but it protects Medicare, Medicaid, education and the environment and cuts taxes for working families," Clinton told the nation's governors at the White House Friday.

But the cutting mostly occurs after this election year, and far into the future. The 1997 savings in domestic discretionary spending, for example, would decrease to $10 billion from the 1996 figure of $12 billion, and would reach significant levels of $74 billion and $96 billion the final two years of the seven-year plan.

Former Sen. Paul E. Tsongas, (D-Mass.), who heads a bipartisan group promoting fiscal discipline, called the Clinton budget "cynical" and "intellectually dishonest."

"What is driving the White House is re-election," Tsongas told a news conference.

He said the budget plan does too little to control spending on entitlement programs and offers unwise tax cuts in the election season and first years of the plan while waiting until later to make the painful spending cuts.

"It frontloads the joy and backloads the pain," he said."
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Clinton fell into budget surpluses - it really wasn't a priority for him.

Look here:
www.cbo.gov/budget/historical.pdf
At Table 11

Taking Budget deficit as a percentage of GDP, Bush II has never had a year as bad as Clinton's first year, -3.9%. Actually as much as Democrats like to huff and puff about it, by the same measure, Bush II's deficit record over his first five years in office if better than Clinton's, -1.98% average vs -2.14%.

Given Edwards poor showing in the debate against Cheney, he's going to have to be pretty impressive to get my support. I was very disappointed by him in 2004.

As you said, it's a "rare progressive moment in national politics: A forthright argument for the importance of, and an increase in, public spending..." This John Edwards is gloves off honest. In NH today, somebody asked where will we get the money from and he mentioned that we spend $2 Billion dollars a WEEK in Iraq. Exxon/Mobil is going to try and kill this man. He's got my support.

I dissent. Paul Krugman makes a perfectly valid POLITICAL point that until Republicans start being fiscally responsible, Democrats may be trapped in a cycle where they keep on lowering the deficit and then the Republicans run it up again.

But it seems to me there is not a valid ECONOMIC case for running continuous deficits. If you noticed, those Clinton economic policies that Robert Reich hates so much not only gave us surpluses, but a very strong economy as well. And now, as Edwards' questioner noted, we are in hock to the Chinese, which hardly makes strategic sense for this country.

There can, theoretically, be a case for running TEMPORARY deficits as an economic stimulus, but the last thing the current economy needs is a stimulus.

And, of course, while the Social Security / Medicare "crisis" rhetoric was overblown, the fact remains that as the boomers retire, those programs will need more money and we are raiding the trust funds right now to pay for current programs, which we shouldn't be doing.

The solution to the political problem Krugman identifies is that if the Democrats keep on reducing the deficit and the Republicans keep on running it up, at some point, nobody's going to believe them anymore and they are going to start losing elections over it.

But this idea that we should give up and maintain the country in a continual state of borrowing from Communist China repudiates one of the great legacies of Bill Clinton. It is an awful idea, and if Edwards keeps talking like this, he will not get my vote.

we are raiding the trust funds right now to pay for current programs, which we shouldn't be doing.

The effect of "raiding" the trust funds is that Congress borrows the money in the trust funds and replaces it with U.S. Government bonds. Government bonds, of course, receive a solid, extremely safe rate of return.

If we didn't "raid" the trust funds, we'd have two options: (1) borrow the money from China instead; or (2) reduce the deficit to the point where we don't need the funds from either source, in which case the trust funds just sit as cash.

If we care about the long-term health of Social Security and Medicare, what makes more sense for the trust funds? Invest them in government bonds where they steadily appreciate, or leave them sitting in cash? Look, the Democrats have the right side of virtually every issue in the Social Security debate, but the notion that Congress is doing something horrible by "raiding" the trust funds is not one of them.

"Taking Budget deficit as a percentage of GDP, Bush II has never had a year as bad as Clinton's first year, -3.9%. Actually as much as Democrats like to huff and puff about it, by the same measure, Bush II's deficit record over his first five years in office if better than Clinton's, -1.98% average vs -2.14%."

Talk about re-writing history. Sorry, dude, whether it was politics, good governance, or just plain luck, there's no way you can spin the fact that Clinton had the budget generating surpluses and Bush went into deficit spending IN HIS FIRST FUCKING YEAR IN OFFICE!

Edwards has my vote based on his vision, integrity and can talk in sentences longer than 2-6 words :)

Have been a supporter since 2003 and he just gets "it" better, like fine wine, which makes me feel warm and fuzzy too!

The solution to the political problem Krugman identifies is that if the Democrats keep on reducing the deficit and the Republicans keep on running it up, at some point, nobody's going to believe them anymore and they are going to start losing elections over it.

Dilan, the problem I have with that is that in the long run, we're all dead. It's past time we had universal health care. The government's current patchwork of spending on health could cover most of the costs of universal health care already; Medicare is already covering the population with the highest costs. End the war and let the Bush tax cuts lapse, and we should at least break even at the Federal level, with employers (who don't have to maintain health plans for their workers) and the citizenry (who don't have to pay for what employers don't) come out way ahead.

That should have the net effect of borrowing less money from the Chinese over time. But if it doesn't, it's still a thing that needs doing, and we can figure out how else we need to pay for it when we get there.

So basically he's a tax and spend liberal. Sorry, I want Clinton, not Lyndon Johnson.

Clinton proved that balancing the budget ensures more prosperity for all, thus making these antipoverty programs almost unnecessary. Edwards' insistence on spending first is going to make us all poorer. But hey, at least we'll fall into that nice safety net!

At least until the money runs out.

Edwards wasn't my first choice, but I was positive about him. Unless he goes back on this statement, I'm supporting Richardson, or Clinton, or Obama. Fiscally responsible Democrats who won't pass debt down to our children and won't raise our taxes so high that we need government assistance just to eat.

Steve:

You are conflating a rhetorical point in the Social Security debate with actual reality. Yes, government bonds are a safe investment in the sense that the government is not going to dishonor the bonds.

But remember, the bondholder here is another arm of the federal government, and the issue isn't whether the Treasury will be good for the bonds but whether a future government decides to cut Social Security or Medicare benefits to avoid a tax increase or other spending cuts needed to pay those moneys back to the Social Security Administration.

And this is a real issue-- Social Security and Medicare aren't a huge problem if we keep the budget in surplus, but the larger the deficit we run, the less money that will be POLITICALLY available to pay of those bonds and redeposit into the Social Security trust fund. Swapping paper between two government agencies doesn't change the fundamental math.

RT:

Any universal health care system is going to need to be self-sufficient, whether or not we run a deficit. But further, if you are concerned about financing universal health care, it would seem to me that you'd want to get the budget back into surplus to have more money to pay for it, not continue running 400 million dollar deficits so that you don't have any breathing room to borrow.

"The solution to the political problem Krugman identifies is that if the Democrats keep on reducing the deficit and the Republicans keep on running it up, at some point, nobody's going to believe them anymore and they are going to start losing elections over it."

Krugman uses that excuse because it's the policy he'd like to see.

The problem with his excuse is that only one Democratic President in recent years has been fiscally responsible: Bill Clinton. LBJ and Carter ran up the deficit and/or raised taxes to cover ever increasing spending.

If the next Democrat is fiscally responsible and the next Republican isn't, that will reinforce the image of Democrats as fiscally responsible. But if Edwards is President and taxes and spends us to death, while the next Republican President borrows and spends, it's a wash.

There is plenty of money to fund programs. If Edwards would show some political courage and say, cut corporate welfare, agriculture subsidies(he'd never do that), and eliminate some unnecessary departments, and wage a campaign against pork, there'd be enough money to do everything he wants except health care. And health care can be sold to people by asking them to pay taxes instead of insurance premiums. Health care should never, EVER, create a deficit unless we're lying to the voters about the costs.

Clinton proved that balancing the budget ensures more prosperity for all, thus making these antipoverty programs almost unnecessary.

Bwahahaha! Look, I'm a Clinton fan, but the notion that he nearly ended poverty? My God!

I guess we didn't need Hillarycare after all, since by the end of Clinton's term, nearly everyone had health care anyway! Oh, the miracles of the balanced budget.

OohMyGawd....he can't actually be telling us the truth?......Heee's Dooomed!!

Actually I want to believe his message is real, even though I've become pretty cynical these last 20 or so years.

Wish him luck in his quest for the WH and especially his defense of the middle class and the worker.

I think some people here are misunderstanding Edwards and Krugman. Edwards is a "walk and chew gum at the same time" kinda guy" from what I've heard. He has addressed the tax cuts for the wealthy and corporate welfare since 2003. It was the cornerstone of his campaign "taxing wealth, not work". Plus he wants to get out of Iraq immediately and spend far less than the 2B a week there while at the same time beefing up our troops in a more productive way. I really think he is a common sense guy. We cannot wait to solve either the healthcare problem or global warming. Both of which he talked about at length in Des Moines and today in New Hampshire. We can find the money. Then with a positive optimistic President who doesn't plan on bankrupting us to make his friends rich, we should be able to turn this country around. We spend over twice as much as other countries on healthcare $6,500 average. So we stop paying the insurance companies. Then tax us $2000 a year and we will still have $4500 left over.

Talk about re-writing history. Sorry, dude, whether it was politics, good governance, or just plain luck, there's no way you can spin the fact that Clinton had the budget generating surpluses and Bush went into deficit spending IN HIS FIRST FUCKING YEAR IN OFFICE!

Posted by: Anonymous | December 29, 2006 04:11 PM
*****************************Talk about spin! Clinton first year in office -3.9%, Bush II first year in office 1.3%. Facts are inconvenient things