Thank you for writing this post, Ezra, seriously. It’s been bothering me that in both debates we’ve seen so far, it was just assumed that the government is going to have to tighten its belt because of the recession. You don’t need a degree in economics to see why that’s a bad assumption. You just need to have a very basic understanding of history to know what Keynesian economics are, and that one of the principles is that the government should increase spending in a recession to stimulate the economy. The way that everyone is carrying on as if they don’t know this is baffling.
The whole situation is a very revealing glimpse into how politics have gotten so stupid. Everything is tailored to this concept of the Average Voter, who is assumed to be very shallow and very stupid. That’s why so much election coverage is so shallow and stupid. Atrios:
People Are Stupid
This is, of course, the assumption pundits make when evaluating the performances of candidates. This is the justification they use for focusing on style over substance, for privileging the trivial over the important.