They Shoot Doggies, Don’t They?

Radley Balko:

In February, I wrote the following about a drug raid in Missouri:

SWAT team breaks into home, fires seven rounds at family’s pit bull and corgi (?!) as a seven-year-old looks on.

They found a “small amount” of marijuana, enough for a misdemeanor charge. The parents were then charged with child endangerment.

So smoking pot = “child endangerment.” Storming a home with guns, then firing bullets into the family pets as a child looks on = necessary police procedures to ensure everyone’s safety.

Just so we’re clear.

Now there’s video, which you can watch below. It’s horrifying, but I’d urge you to watch it, and to send it to the drug warriors in your life. This is the blunt-end result of all the war imagery and militaristic rhetoric politicians have been spewing for the last 30 years—cops dressed like soldiers, barreling through the front door middle of the night, slaughtering the family pets, filling the house with bullets in the presence of children, then having the audacity to charge the parents with endangering their own kid. There are 100-150 of these raids every day in America, the vast, vast majority like this one, to serve a warrant for a consensual crime.

But Jonathan Whitworth won’t be smoking that pot they found in his possession. So I guess this mission was a success.

Mike Riggs at Daily Caller:

Daily Tribune reporter Brennan David submitted a public information request for the video immediately after the charges were filed in February and was denied because the video was being used in criminal proceedings. “I knew that SWAT video was available and that SWAT teams use video. The deputy chief told me that he had watched it a few times,” David said.

He requested the video again after Whitworth pleaded down to possession of paraphernalia and paid the possession fine earlier this month. David says his request was granted within 72 hours and that it does not show the corgi being shot.

Columbia PD spokeswoman Jessie Haden told David on Monday that an ongoing investigation of the use of firearms inside an occupied home is “expected to be completed within the next two weeks,” and that “Internal Affairs is conducting the review because the incident involved multiple shots and was inside an occupied residence. This allows Internal Affairs sergeants to review the incident independent from the SWAT command.”

According to the Tribune’s first report in February, “SWAT members encountered a pit bull upon entry, held back and then fatally shot the dog, which officers said was acting in an uncontrollably aggressive manner.”

John Cole:

This is what happens when you give a bunch of cowboy assholes heavy weapons and fill them with a God complex. Although I’m sure Joe Lieberman would suggest we strip this family of their citizenship.

Oddly enough, I doubt the tea partiers screaming about individual liberty will notice this. After all, it isn’t like the cops were going to raise their taxes or provide them with affordable healthcare coverage. They were just shooting his dogs in front of his family and then made up some bullshit excuse to try to take away the kid. No big deal.

Mark Thompson at The League:

What is so remarkable about this video is precisely that it is so unremarkable, depicting something that happens up to 40,000 times a year.  Indeed, perhaps nothing proves how common this is more than the calm, cool, and thoroughly routine manner in which the agents of tyranny carry out their task, quickly disposing of the family dogs (one of which was a corgi) and filling the victim’s home with bullets within, literally, moments.  All in front of what looks to be the victim’s six or seven year old son.

The cops did recover a “small” amount of marijuana though, which was apparently enough to charge the parents with child endangerment.  Somehow, the people who riddled that child’s home with bullets, killed that child’s pets, and forcibly removed that child’s father – all while the child was looking – were not charged with child endangerment.

When the government has the right to bust into tens of thousands of homes in the middle of the night, unannounced, with guns drawn and in full military armor, to take the life of beloved family members, and to menace 6-year old children, all because the homeowner is believed to possess a few grams of a plant or a non-explosive substance, tyranny cannot be said to be on the way.  It’s already here.  And President Obama wasn’t the one who created it, either.

I will believe that conservatives and the American Right view the words “liberty” and “tyranny” as something other than politically effective platitudes when they make putting an end to 40,000 raids like this a year a higher priority than whether they are taxed to provide someone else with health care or the unrealized hypothetical consequences of cap and trade.

Tim Lynch at Cato:

In America today, lawmaking is discussed much too casually.  The consequences are not seriously considered.  We allow agencies to issue regulations without having a formal vote in the legislature.  “Too cumbersome.”  Compliance is automatically assumed.  Few want to consider whether the use of brute force can be justified against someone who resists, or the danger that might be created for the innocent who get swept up in investigations.   We now have thousands of rules and regulations on the books.

We suffered through the painful lessons of liquor prohibition, but have been slow to see the parallels in the drug war.  A few years ago, Cato published a report on these paramilitary raids, called Overkill. The author of that study, Radley Balko, has been vigilant about highlighting these raids and dispelling the idea that they are just a few “isolated incidents.”

Conor Friedersdorf at The American Scene:

The longer I’m around, and the more I despair about movement conservatism as a whole, the more I’m impressed by two right-leaning organizations, Cato and Reason, for bankrolling the important work done by Mr. Balko, Julian Sanchez on surveillance, and other staffers too numerous to mention here, whose output I don’t just respect, but judge to be vital. The same goes for the Institute for Justice’s work on asset forfeiture, and a few other organizations on the right whose work often overlaps with left-leaning folks at the ACLU and similar organizations.

Health care and cap and trade are important issues, and the policy choices made do have implications for personal and political freedom, but one effect of demagoguery about “liberty and tyranny,” and the supposed embrace of statism by the whole left, is that it obscures or even poisons alliances between right and left against actual abuses that are going on now, and all that is gained are cheap, largely inconsequential political points on issues that at most concern predicted abuses at the end of a slippery slope that we aren’t yet careening down.

I don’t know if Brink Lindsey and Will Wilkinson can succeed at their very-much-worth-trying liberaltarian project, but I wish that one way or another, liberty-minded folks on right and left can refrain from demonizing one another about their disagreements enough to cooperate on drugs, prison, detainee policy, and all other matters related to wars without end.

Von at Obsidian Wings:

Put aside the wisdom or morality of the drug war.  Balko and Sullivan both pivot that way.  I want to talk about something different.  Something a bit larger.  Folks talk about the banality of evil.  It’s one of those cliches that you hear from time time.  But I don’t think that folks stop very often to think about what that phrase means.  Or what it looks like in action.  Evil becomes banal when people — good people — stop recognizing it, stop appreciating it, and come to accept it as normal.  When evil becomes so routine that good people accept it as the way of doing business.

I am not comparing the cops in the video to Nazis (whence the phrase comes).  But it’s hard for me to see their actions, here, as anything other than evil.  Maybe I’m overly influenced by having kids; maybe I’m not thinking straight.  But my reaction to watching these cops, dressed to kill, bashing down a door and shooting two dogs (a pit bull and a corgi) in front of a seven year old child all because his father had a little bit of pot … well, my initial reaction was shock.  This video literally took my breath away.  Followed, quickly, by anger.  This kid could easily have been killed for nothing; he certainly will be scarred.

The second greatest trick the Devil ever played was to convince folks that being good, and having good intentions, means that you can’t do evil.  That is bullshit.  These cops are likely good people who do a lot of good in their community. But this was a cheorographed raid.  They had overwhelming force.  There was no resistance.  This wasn’t a war.  They weren’t being shot at.  The target was clear.  Their acts were premeditated.  This wasn’t stupidity, or error, or chance.  No conceivable hypothetical — no matter how outlandish — justifies the behavior of these men. There was no ticking time bomb.  (They were simply looking for “a large amount of marijuana at the location.” Which wasn’t there.)

This is what evil looks like.  On this night, these cops decided to be thugs.

Mark Kleiman

Andrew Sullivan

Megan McArdle:

This is our nation’s drug enforcement in a nutshell.  We started out by banning the things.  And people kept taking them.  So we made the punishments more draconian.  But people kept selling them.  So we pushed the markets deep into black market territory, and got the predictable violence . . . and then we upped our game, turning drug squads into quasi-paramilitary raiders.  Somewhere along the way, we got so focused on enforcing the law that we lost sight of the purpose of the law, which is to make life in America better.

I don’t know how anyone can watch that video, and think to themselves, “Yes, this is definitely worth it to rid the world of the scourge of excess pizza consumption and dopey, giggly conversations about cartoons.”  Short of multiple homicide, I’m having trouble coming up with anything that justifies that kind of police action.  And you know, I doubt the police could either.  But they weren’t busy trying to figure out if they were maximizing the welfare of their larger society. They were, in that most terrifying of phrases, just doing their jobs.

And in the end, that is our shame, not theirs.

Kevin Drum:

CPD Internal Affairs continues to investigate whether this was an appropriate response to the “tip” they received that started all this.

UPDATE: Radley Balko at Reason

E.D. Kain

John Cole

Dan Riehl

UPDATE #2: Scott Horton at Harper’s

And Now It Is The GOP’s Turn…

Ezra Klein:

Late last night, the Congressional Budget Office released its initial analysis of the health-care reform plan that Republican Minority Leader John Boehner offered as a substitute to the Democratic legislation. CBO begins with the baseline estimate that 17 percent of legal, non-elderly residents won’t have health-care insurance in 2010. In 2019, after 10 years of the Republican plan, CBO estimates that …17 percent of legal, non-elderly residents won’t have health-care insurance. The Republican alternative will have helped 3 million people secure coverage, which is barely keeping up with population growth. Compare that to the Democratic bill, which covers 36 million more people and cuts the uninsured population to 4 percent.

But maybe, you say, the Republican bill does a really good job cutting costs. According to CBO, the GOP’s alternative will shave $68 billion off the deficit in the next 10 years. The Democrats, CBO says, will slice $104 billion off the deficit.

The Democratic bill, in other words, covers 12 times as many people and saves $36 billion more than the Republican plan. And amazingly, the Democratic bill has already been through three committees and a merger process. It’s already been shown to interest groups and advocacy organizations and industry stakeholders. It’s already made its compromises with reality. It’s already been through the legislative sausage grinder. And yet it saves more money and covers more people than the blank-slate alternative proposed by John Boehner and the House Republicans. The Democrats, constrained by reality, produced a far better plan than Boehner, who was constrained solely by his political imagination and legislative skill.

Susan Ferrechio at The Washington Examiner:

The Congressional Budget Office Wednesday night released its cost analysis of the Republican health care plan and found that it would reduce health care premiums and cut the deficit by $68 billion over ten years.

The Republican plan does not call for a government insurance plan but rather attempts to reform the system by creating high-risk insurance pools, allowing people to purchase health insurance policies across state lines and instituting medical malpractice reforms.

“Not only does the GOP plan lower health care costs, but it also increases access to quality care, including for those with pre-existing conditions, at a price our country can afford,” House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, said.

According to CBO, the GOP bill would indeed lower costs, particularly for small businesses that have trouble finding affordable health care policies for their employees. The report found rates would drop by seven to 10 percent for this group, and by five to eight percent for the individual market, where it can also be difficult to find affordable policies.

The GOP plan would have the smallest economic impact on the large group market that serves people working for large businesses that have access to the cheapest coverage. Those premiums would decline by zero to 3 percent, the CBO said.

Matthew Yglesias:

To repeat myself from yesterday, this is basically a plan that works well for you if you never get sick. Instead of wasting money on taxes and or premiums to cover your own illness or that of your fellow Americans, you’ll have more money in your pocket to spend on NBA League Pass or what have you. If you’re uninsured or at risk of losing your insurance, this plan does nothing for you. If you’re insured and putting your insurance to use by getting sick, this plan is a disaster, offering you less coverage.

Jennifer Rubin at Commentary:

Not surprisingly, Democrats are grousing that it doesn’t do much to expand coverage. But that wasn’t the point. The aim was to look at the overwhelming majority of Americans who have insurance or who might want to (not be forced to) buy insurance and make it cheaper.

We’ll see if Pelosi allows a vote on it, or if she can even muster the 218 to pass her gargantuan measure. And after Tuesday, she might need some votes to make up for potential defections from Virginia. There are a couple Democrats who might want to preserve their re-election prospects.

Von:

Now, nothing in the GOP plan will satisfy someone who thinks that the current system requires immediate reform.  And the GOP plan is ultimately unsatisfying to me because it defers a lot of the hard choices.  On the other hand, if you think that the Democratic plan is worse than the status quo, maybe a little deferring is a good thing.

And there’s the political problem for Democrats:  Although the Democratic plan is more comprehensive, expands coverages, and arguably fixes more problems — while potentially creating others — the Republican plan is likely better for more folks who already have insurance.  It is also likely be perceived as being better for seniors because, unlike the Democratic proposals, it doesn’t cut Medicare.   Folks who already have health care and seniors are not just the vast majority of voters, they also vote in vastly greater numbers than the primary beneficiaries of the Democratic plan.

I was complaining a little while back that Republicans didn’t have a response to Team Obama on health care.  I take it all back.  The GOP plan is pretty good, if you apply the right yardstick.  The question for the electorate is:  which yardstick are you gonna apply?

Jonathan Cohn at TNR:

So, yes, the Republican health care bill will lower premiums overall. But many people in poor health will see their premiums go up. And many people will get lower premiums only because they’re getting inferior coverage. Meanwhile, more than 50 million people will have no insurance whatsoever.

Note: Are wondering what CBO is likely to say about premiums in the Democratic plans? Good question. Watch this space for some answers soon.

John Walsh And The Sex Laws Of Unintended Consequences

Classically Liberal:

These laws are not so much protecting children from predators as they are turning them into predators. Look at this chart. Individuals who are legally defined as sex offenders. When you look at the ages of the offenders you see that 14-year-olds are apparently the most sexually dangerous group in America. The rate declines from there, but throughout adolescence the law is far more likely to deem kids as offenders. You may imagine the dirty old man down the street. But with age people are less likely to “offend”. One reason is that they are more mature. But another reason is clear. Once you reach a certain age, having sex with people your own age is normally not considered a crime. The explosion of “youthful sex offenders” is not the result of our kids becoming perverts. It is the result of the law criminalizing what is a normal part of growing up.

These kids are criminals, not necessarily because they violated the life, liberty or property of another person. They are criminals because the politicians defined them as criminals. These damned “family values” conservatives, and compassionate feminist Leftists, who banded together to “save the children,” turned America’s kids into sex offenders by fiat. And they feel good about it. They are satisfied by it and only wish more had been rounded up earlier. The Left wants everyone in therapy and under the perpetual care of the state, and the Right wants everyone in prison, or in fear of the law, and under the thumb of the police. And that is what is happening.

Don’t think you can even explain to your kids all the ways in which the State can turn them into sex offenders. I doubt that even a qualified attorney can do that. The laws are constantly changing, usually for the worse. The mob brays for ritual sacrifices and your child is the Jacob they want placed on the altar. They will only be happy when they see the knife plunge downward, hear the tortured scream of the child; watch the blood drain from the trembling body. Then they will be satiated, until the next Jacob comes along. Unlike Jehovah, the political mob will not stay the hand that holds the knife. They will, instead, demand bigger knives, sharper knives, and more stabs into the heart, more children on the altar, even more altars. They want someone to suffer. After all, we have to protect the children.

Radley Balko:

This is one of the more moving blog posts I’ve read in a long time.

The pictures are just crushing.

Op-ed at The Economist:

The registry is a gold mine for lazy journalists. A local television station featured Ms Whitaker in a spot on local sex offenders, broadcasting a helpful map showing where she lives but leaving the specifics of the crime to each viewer’s fearful imagination. “My husband’s family saw me on TV,” she says. “That’s embarrassing.”

What Ms Whitaker did is no longer a crime in Georgia. The state’s sodomy laws, which in 1996 barred oral sex even between willing spouses, were struck down by court rulings in 1998 and 2003. And since 2006, thanks to a “Romeo and Juliet” clause in a sex-crimes law, consensual sex between two teenagers has been a misdemeanour, not a crime, if one partner is underage but no more than four years younger than the other.

The Romeo and Juliet clause was not retroactive, however, so Ms Whitaker is stuck on the register, and subject to extraordinary restrictions. Registered sex offenders in Georgia are barred from living within 1,000 feet of anywhere children may congregate, such as a school, a park, a library, or a swimming pool. They are also banned from working within 1,000 feet of a school or a child-care centre. Since the church at the end of Ms Whitaker’s street houses a child-care centre, she was evicted from her home. Her husband, who worked for the county dog-catching department, moved with her, lost his job and with it their health insurance.

Thanks to a lawsuit filed by the Southern Centre for Human Rights, a group that campaigns against rough justice, Ms Whitaker won an injunction allowing her to return home. But her husband did not get his job back, and now works as a labourer. The two of them are struggling financially. And Ms Whitaker is still fighting to get her name removed from the registry. “When you’re a teenager, you do stuff,” she says. “You don’t think you’ll be paying for it when you’re nearly 30.”

Every American state keeps a register of sex offenders. California has had one since 1947, but most states started theirs in the 1990s. Many people assume that anyone listed on a sex-offender registry must be a rapist or a child molester. But most states spread the net much more widely. A report by Sarah Tofte of Human Rights Watch, a pressure group, found that at least five states required men to register if they were caught visiting prostitutes. At least 13 required it for urinating in public (in two of which, only if a child was present). No fewer than 29 states required registration for teenagers who had consensual sex with another teenager. And 32 states registered flashers and streakers.

Because so many offences require registration, the number of registered sex offenders in America has exploded. As of December last year, there were 674,000 of them, according to the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children. If they were all crammed into a single state, it would be more populous than Wyoming, Vermont or North Dakota. As a share of its population, America registers more than four times as many people as Britain, which is unusually harsh on sex offenders. America’s registers keep swelling, not least because in 17 states, registration is for life.

Andrew Sullivan

Amy Alkon at Men’s News Daily:

Note that the sex offender laws didn’t protect Jaycee Dugard from Philip Garrido. They do, however, protect kids who had oral sex when their parents away from ever having normal lives.

James Joyner:

This is indeed a truly bizarre situation.  I understand the rationale behind and generally support statutory rape laws, which maintain that children lack the capacity to form consent.  It makes sense to prosecute 35-year-olds who have sex with 13-year-olds.  Not so much, though, 18-year-olds who have sex with 16-year-olds.  And it’s just insane to criminalize 14-year-olds having sex with other 14-year-olds.  Indeed, absent the use of force or other coercion, I’m at pains to understand how a child can commit sexual assault.

Quotulatiousness:

The absurdity of charging a teenager with statutory rape for having sex with another teenager (and sometimes even charging each partner for victimizing the other) shouldn’t need to be discussed — it’s flat-out insane for the legal system to be involved in the vast majority of these cases. They shouldn’t even be cases!

It is literally true that a teen would be punished far less severely for murder than for consensual sexual contact with another teen. A murderer, after a trial is sentenced to a term in prision (with the possibility of parole/early release in many cases). After being released from prison, they’ve “paid their debt to society” and at least in theory can try to resume a normal life.

Someone who gets caught up in the “sexual offender” category will be punished for the rest of his or her life: once their names go on the official register, they will never, ever, be free again. They can’t work in any job that might mean contact with the general public (if they can even get hired at all). They can’t live within arbitrary distances of schools, playgrounds, or other areas where children might gather . . . which in practice means they can’t legally live anywhere.

How is this in any way proportional to the “crime”? How can this be called “justice”?

Von:

So, I agree with Radley and Classically Liberal that these laws need reform.  There is a “but,” however.  To me, there were two shocking aspects of Classically Liberal’s set of underaged mug shots.  The first was how young these kids looked.  They are too young.  The second was that nearly every kid chosen used by Classically Liberal for inclusion appears to be white.  [See Update.] (There is one kid who may be Hispanic.)

I don’t know how that came about.  It’s unlikely that every (or nearly every) young boy who ends up on a sex offender registry is a white kid.  Indeed, my bet is that black kids are more likely to be victimized by these kinds of laws, given the legacy of racism that we Americans continue to shoulder — a legacy particularly chronic at the intersection of black, youth, and sex.

To be clear, I’m not faulting Classically Liberal for what is a pretty stunning blog entry:  a great piece of work, a moving piece of work.  I’m not implying that CL is racist or that he anyone used race in choosing these photographs.*  And I don’t subscribe to the view that everything must have the racial balance of a network sitcom.  (Here’s the blonde with the perfect hair; here’s the sassy Puerto Rican; here’s the high-striving black girl with her goofy cousin; here’s the asian dude who’s into hip-hop; here’s the bad-boy brunette ….)

But I can’t keep myself from posing a dangerous question:  Does this blog post contain more power for me because the kids look like I once did?  Because they are white like me?

The Blame Game

Deficit spending… whose to blame? Obama? Bush? Clinton? William Henry Harrison?

Von:

Anyhow:  if you haven’t heard of President Obama’s looming budget crisis, you will.  Obama and the Democratically-controlled Congress are creating debts and deficits larger than any other US government in the history of the Republic, under any measure, with the singular exceptions of the governments that got involved in a bet-the-country war.

Conor Friedersdorf:

I am not one for overheated rhetoric, but the word for that level of spending — far exceeding even a war-of-choice starting spendthrift like George W. Bush — is radical.

I’d only add that the United States is inevitably going to be confronted by unexpected challenges in coming years—perhaps quite grave ones. Imagine that circa 2015, we are facing worse than expected climate change, or the destruction of Midtown Manhattan by terrorists, or a collapse in Los Angeles port and freeway infrastructure due to a major earthquake and tsunami, or Russian aggression in the North Pole that demands a costly military response, or a flue pandemic that cuts world economic output in half.

A prudent country saves something for inevitable hardships. Our country has spent years of relative luck and prosperity spending ever more — and now we’re planning to accelerate the trend.

Andrew Sullivan:

That context is a) an inheritance of unprecedented debt accumulated under Bush and Cheney – debt that is largely already built in to the fiscal future Obama is now blamed for (two wars, huge tax cuts and Medicare D); and b) a phenomenally brutal downturn which had the potential to turn into a global depression (a potential that still exists if in milder form). I don’t blame Obama for failing to turn all this around in five months, and for running a debt this big right now. I will blame him if he does nothing serious to tackle this in the next year. That does not mean bromides about how healthcare reform will save us all money. It means serious cuts in defense, entitlements and corporate welfare (and perhaps a VAT or a serious gas tax).

Friedersdorf responds to Sullivan:

Fair enough. I neither blame President Obama for creating this mess nor fault him “for failing to turn all this around in five months,” especially given the arguably wise decision to aim fiscal stimulus at averting a possible global depression. What I object to, however, is the notion that accurately apportioning blame is the proper lens through which to view all this. I blame the Bush Administration for its profligate spending, but that isn’t a point that mitigates the harm that will be done by the planned, non-emergency outlays of President Obama. The Bush era’s two costly wars, huge tax cuts and prescription drug benefit make costly endeavors by a successor administration that much more unaffordable, and thus even less fiscally responsible, than they’d otherwise be.

Noah Millman, with a large post:

I agree with Conor that blame is not the issue – but attribution is important. If we have massive, structural deficits, we need a structural solution. Complaining about waste is not a structural solution. Categorically opposing any new spending because of the deficits is even worse – spending on initiatives that will generate long-term returns is the sort of spending we should be doing, so if (and it’s a big if) government spending were going up in “good” areas, we shouldn’t be opposing that; we should be looking to reduce spending in “bad” areas – meaning, areas that are less productive.

The Obama Administration has two big talking points about the deficit and how they are going to bring it under control.

The first is that health care reform will do it. This claim is, at best, highly speculative. The main evidence to back it up is that other countries spend less than we do and get comparable (or, in some cases, better) health outcomes. But it does not follow that by enacting politically plausible reforms we would actually move our health spending meaningfully in their directions. Other countries pay doctors a lot less than we do; other countries spend much less on end-of-life and beginning-of-life care; other countries spend much less on medical innovation (and free-ride on our greater spending in this area); other countries tolerate significant limits on the freedom of their citizens to purchase private insurance or see physicians privately. I do not forsee health care reform in America changing any of these. That doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing. We could probably do a great deal to improve labor market competitiveness by making insurance more portable (which some kind of public health insurance option would do as well). We could surely get better health-care options with better incentives to deliver good preventative care. I’ve just very skeptical that any of these things will wind up saving us a lot of money. At the least, I think it’s imprudent to assume that they would.

The second is that an economic recovery will do it. If 37% of the swing from surplus to deficit is due to the recession, then presumably 37% of the problem solves itself. No? No. Because a great deal of the growth of the past decade turns out to have been based on illusion, not true growth in productivity, there is good reason to suspect that our true sustainable rate of real growth is lower than was projected at the end of the 1990s. Moreover, there is this huge mountain of private sector debt to pay off. That will require reductions in consumption and increases in savings. That will depress growth for years, if not decades. Prudently, we should be assuming a real rate of growth significantly below the trend of the past 25 years for the next 10 years at least.

Megan McArdle posits that nobody really cares about the deficit.

Economically, much of the talk about deficits is hysteria.  A budget deficit of less than 4% of GDP is not a good thing, but it rarely results in catastrophe either, because inflation and GDP growth steadily erode the value of past debt.  As long as the deficit is less than inflation + GDP growth, the government is unlikely to get into much trouble.  It’s possible that this borrowing may crowd out private borrowing, but at least over the last decade, this has obviously not been the case.

The reason not to run budget deficits (other than in times of war and depression) is prosier:  it’s bad political economy.   Governments shouldn’t run deficits to fund ongoing spending for the same reason that it’s not a good idea to run up credit card debt to pay for groceries.

But that’s not the point of worrying about the budget deficit.  The point of worrying about the budget deficit is to bash your political opponents.  Why this works, given the obvious hypocrisy of all parties on this score, is beyond me.  But apparently it does, or at least a lot of people think it does, and so we’re stuck with the current silly debate over how bad our budget deficits are, and more importantly, who we can blame them on.

Sullivan responds to McArdle

More when I find it.

UPDATE: Jonathan Chait in TNR

UPDATE #2: Megan McArdle

No, I didn’t say that any president would have spent on the specific, often stupid things that Bush did.  They would have found their own specific, often stupid things to spend on, and maybe, hopefully, even some non-stupid things.  Some of those things would have resembled what Bush did:  Medicare Part D was coming, and a Democratic package was going to cost more.  But more broadly, when the stock market bubble evaporated, the surplus would have gone away regardless of who was president–and so would the political will for high taxes or cutting spending.

But Andrew’s post really illustrates why I say no one cares about the budget deficit.  What does it matter what he spent the money on?  The problem with budget deficits is that they will crowd out private investments, or that they bequeath a legacy of high interest costs and/or principal repayments to future presidents, and the taxpayers they represent.  The market does not care whether we spent it on invading Iraq or finding a cure for AIDS, or a flat panel in every home.  It will charge us interest, or deprive the private sector of capital, just the same.

Would Andrew let Bush off the hook for the Iraq war spending if he’d raised taxes to pay for it?  Would anyone stop complaining about the hundreds of billions we’ve spent so far?

The budget is just a side show–because it has hard numbers, it seems to lend some sort of “provability” to peoples’ prior policy preferences.  But the actual provable harm from the Bush budget deficits is small.  As I pointed out earlier, net debt has risen very little as a percentage of GDP, net interest has actually fallen in real terms and as a percentage of GDP, and it is demonstrably false that Bush deficits diverted investment capital from the private sector–or at least, if they did, they did us a favor, by keeping the mortgage bubble from getting even bigger than it did.