Scot Lehigh

goes sighing after the soothing syrup of compromise in today's Boston Globe column.
He has the entirely unoriginal and neoconish notion that if those darn democrats and republicans down in Washington could just get together and compromise with manly bipartisanship, the budget deficit would get solved overnight.
THEY would have to swallow tax increases...
WE would have to chow down on "entitlement reform"...or so he argues more or less.

Usually this is where I snark off about Scot and his neconish notions, but today I will only add that sometimes compromise is in the worst interests of the Nation and our Progeny. Operationally speaking it is hard to compromise with politicians whose base requires them to wallow in increasingly paranoid eliminationist fantasies...But then that should be obvious to everyone at this point.
More importantly I'm just gonna add the counterintuitive point that in a deep jobless recession, worrying about the damn deficit really ought to be put off to another day.
Getting people back on the job, paying taxes and spending money is an of itself a strong deficit reduction tactic.
Full bellies make better decisions on the deficit, getting stampeded into some grand desperate plan to reduce Federal spending now is a formula for disaster. Stern measures are taken more easily in phat times.
But
Then
Humble Elias isn't an economist, but then neither is Scot Lehigh