National Debt

Via Mary Katharine Ham:

Though he did not win a single state, Ross Perot garnered almost 20 percent of the national presidential vote in 1992, dooming President George H.W. Bush's reelection campaign. Two years later, Newt Gingrich, Dick Armey, Frank Luntz, and other architects of the Republican Revolution found a way to persuade the Perotistas to swing Republican. (Bill Clinton helped in his own way, too.) The result was GOP dominance in both houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years.

The Perot issues -- government spending, deficits, and debt -- disappeared after the billionaire's last presidential campaign in 1996, when he took only 8 percent of the vote. The 1997 budget deal between Clinton and Gingrich gave us balanced budgets and an eventual surplus. But the Perot voters did not disappear. They remained dormant for years, until the Bush immigration proposals in 2006 and 2007 created a populist backlash. Then came 2009, and Obama's big government liberalism brought the Perot supporters and other disillusioned Americans back into politics. Another Perot moment had begun.

One day after President Obama's personal celebration of his "economic stimulus" package -- which launched $787 billion in unfunded federal spending but failed to keep unemployment from clearing 10 percent (but did secure some public union jobs) -- Matt Miller writes in today's Washington Post that "the current panic over the national debt is a little mad."  Miller grants that, if the White House's own projections of nearly a trillion dollars in new deficit spending per year over the next decade prove to be right, "these levels of debt would be country-wrecking, next-generation-crushing and downright wrong."  But he remains optimistic that these White House projections won't become reality, and he defends Obama's deficits to date as "unavoidable -- and indispensable."