What Would Gore Do?

Megan McArdle:

"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."