"Because we never face up to how much we need government to do, there is a pathetic quality to our discussion of big deficits.

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It's a debate also characterized by a politically convenient amnesia. Just a decade ago, we were running surpluses so big that Alan Greenspan, then chairman of the Federal Reserve, worried about what would happen once our national debt was liquidated. We had this problem well in hand until we started waging wars and cutting taxes at the same time.

What would a rational approach to the budget look like? It would begin by accepting that running deficits at a time of high unemployment is a good thing. We would celebrate the fact that the world's governments were far wiser in this downturn than their counterparts were during the Great Depression.

It is a hugely underrated achievement of international cooperation that the world's 20 leading economic powers pumped trillions of dollars into the global economy to prevent collapse. Catastrophe was averted, and growth, although sluggish, has resumed.

True, unemployment in our country is still too high. But the lesson here is not that President Obama's economic stimulus failed but that it was too small to do all that was needed. Those who would repeal stimulus spending -- the bright idea of the House Republican Study Committee -- would take us backward.



Yet no one should doubt that we must put our long-term fiscal house in order. The discussion should not be confined to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. We need to ask a basic question: What do we want government to do, and, yes, how much will taxes have to go up so we can pay our bills?

Like it or not, government must grow in the coming decades because the private economy will not offer the same security it once did through employer-provided health and pension plans.

On health care, the status quo means that more Americans will find themselves without insurance because an ever-growing number of employers simply won't be able to afford the expense. This is unsustainable. Enacting health reform now will allow us to plan how government can take on these costs gradually.
..." (WaPo)