This is what we talk about when we talk about debt

I’ve made the point before that when people complain about deficits they don’t really mean deficits. Obviously that’s not universally true, but in these moments when ‘deficits’ or ‘debt’ become significant political issues they are often simply a stand-in for concern about a bad economy.

This video (linked to in this Slate column) reminds me of one of the classic examples of this phenomenon. It’s from a town hall debate in the 1992 presidential campaign.

The woman asks how the debt affects each candidate personally. There is confusion. Of course the debt doesn’t affect them personally so how are they supposed to respond? It’s only resolved once you realize that she really just means the economy. How have the tough economic times affected you personally?

Even if you believe that the debt is a proximate cause of economic decline, that’s very different from treating them as synonymous. The conflation of the two is particularly disastrous in circumstances where short-term spending is the way out of recession.

I think our political discussions would be significantly improved if we didn’t take the surface-level account as the definitive truth and instead pressed just a little bit to see what lies underneath. For another example, see this post from Jonathan Bernstein asking for a bit more investigation of the apparently shocking fact that a majority of likely Republican primary voters are birthers.