Stephen Kirchner raises all sorts of issues in this post (no permalink) which I just found (interestingly enough, just after giving a talk to a leftish audience in which I criticized, among other ‘magic puddings’, the idea that expenditure could be funded by deficits in the long run). After talking in a rather waffly way about the US budget, Kirchner says:

Similarly, it has been amusing to watch many left-of-centre economists re-discover fiscal conservatism now that the government in the US is spending money on stuff they don’t like. John Quiggin characteristically overstates his case in referring to the rise of ‘banana republic populism’ in the US. There are many objections one could raise to the growth in non-defence discretionary outlays under the Bush Administration. But one can’t help but think that deficits of similar magnitude incurred by a Democratic Administration in the wake of a major recession would not occasion similarly alarmist predictions from the likes of Quiggin.

My first response is that it’s a bit annoying when you take the trouble to post almost your entire output on the Web and someone makes this kind of comment without reading what you’ve written. I’ve written many times, and in many different contexts, on the need for a ‘golden rule’ approach in which budgets are balanced (more precisely, public net worth is stable) over the course of the economic cycle. But Kirchner feels free to present me as a recent convert to fiscal conservatism motivated by political partisanship.

The second point is that the objection is not to the current relatively modest deficits, associated, as Kirchner says, with a major recession, but at the projection of deficits growing indefinitely into the future. Brad de Long gives the alarming details in numerous posts on his site.

The final point relates to Kirchner’s own inconsistency. He denies being a Keynesian, but seems to imply that running deficits in recessions isn’t such a bad idea (or maybe he’s just imputing this viewpoint to me). Or perhaps, like the US Republicans, he thinks that deficits are always good. I’ll leave it to him to clarify his position on all this.

To summarise, I don’t see anything wrong with the proposed US budget deficit for this year or next . But if a government of any political color put forward a long-term fiscal strategy as irresponsible as that put up by Bush, I would certainly be raising the alarm.

Update Following a discussion you can read in the comments thread, Stephen Kirchner has now graciously withdrawn the suggestion that my concern about fiscal sustainability is politically selective.

Internationalism is not a political movement like social democracy or neoliberalism, nor is it a central term in a body of argument, like globalisation. Rather, it is a general aspiration. So I’m going to offer my own definition, and try to tease out its relevance to our present problems. As opposed to globalism, internationalism accepts the reality and legitimacy of national governments. This legitimacy arises in part from acceptance of the idea of the nation-state, that particular groups of people (nations) are bound together by ties of common history and language, and are natural units of governments. But the legitimacy of the nation-state is provisional, dependent on both on the consent of the people who make up the nation and on adherence to evolving rules of international law. So, for internationalists, notions of sovereignty, derived from the idea that a king or emperor has the right to manage the affairs of his domain as he sees fit, are problematic.

From an internationalist viewpoint, the debate over the war between Iraq and the US-led coalition has been highly unsatisfactory. On the one hand, the anti-war idea that Iraq is a sovereign nation and that interference with its internal affairs is necessarily wrong cannot be accepted. Saddam’s lack of democratic legitimacy and numerous breaches of international law give the world community the right to protect itself. On the other hand, despite the figleaf of claiming to enforce UN resolutions (now virtually abandoned) the US-led coalition has relied essentially on nationalist arguments that the US has the right to do whatever it sees fit to promote its own national security and national interest. The commonly heard statement ‘S11 changed everything’ can be unpacked into a claim that, in a situation where the US has been subject to direct attack, it is not bound by any concept of international law.

The outcomes of the war so far give strong support to the internationalist view. In particular, the arguments for reliance on international organisations like the United Nations are, in large measure, the same as the arguments for liberal democracy within nations, for example, that no one nation (person) has the wisdom to make the decisions for everyone and that any nation (person) who is given a position of absolute power will ultimately abuse it. It is already clear that on the key issue that divided the US from the majority of members of the UNSC (the claim that Saddam’s weapons represented an immediate threat, and the claim that the calculus of costs and benefits favored immediate action over taking time to build an international consensus), the US was wrong and the majority was right.

The long-rumoured 7:30 Report segment on blogging went to air today. Other Ozbloggers covered were James Morrow, Gareth Parker and Gianna. I thought it was a pretty good introductory piece, with some cool montages. Gareth had a cool shot as a footy umpire (but his blog wasn’t given much of a run) and Gianna was shot with a very arty black background. I did my usual academic office thing, and James was shown at home. It seems like there’s a few visitors who are coming in because of the show, and I’d be interested in your thoughts (click on the “Comments” link, read others’ comments and add your own).

Sadly, Salam Pax, the Baghdad blogger who was featured in the opening of the segment has not posted for more than a week – maybe because Saddam’s police got to him or maybe because of the cutoff of Internet access, now complete since the Americans bombed the telephone network out of existence.

Update A colleague has emailed me to say that, according to Al Jazeera, salam pax is wounded in hospital. He seems to be in the city of Najaf. The doctor said that he was on his computer when his house was hit by a bomb.

Further update There’s a transcript of the 7:30 report segment here.

Further update 5 April Jim Henley reports that Al Jazeera’s English-language site is up here, and there is no mention of salam. So I guess something got confused along the way as happens with rumours of war. I hope so, anyway.

Within the first hour of war (when I was at Parliament House in fact), the newsticker included claims that two entire Iraqi divisions were about to surrender. Twelve days later, Associate Press is running a story headed Three Iraqi Soldiers Desert the Army (running frontpage on the LA Times website). I was going to do one of those calculations about how long it would take for the entire Iraqi army to desert at this pace, but you get the drift.

Via The Agonist, I found this story of a journalist who sued Fox News after being fired because she was unwilling to participate in a false report about growth hormones. Allegedly, Fox won its case at the appellate level on the basis that the First Amendment included the right to lie (and presumably to force employees to lie).
I couldn’t find a confirming source for the story, which is in an Internet publication called the Sierra Times, and includes a mis-spelling of Rupert Murdoch’s name, and I must admit it sounds too good to be true -has anyone else among the Agonist’s legion of readers picked this up?

Almost instant update Me No No supplies a range of links, which led me to the Appeal Court’s judgement, available as a PDF file from this site, basically confirming the Sierra Times story (but not the original heading of my post, which I’ve now qualified). The crucial para is “We agree with WTVT that the FCC’s policy against the intentional falsification of the news – which the FCC has called its “news distortion policy” – does not qualify as the required “law, rule, or regulation” under section 448.102.” To clarify, the lawsuit was brought under a whistleblower protection act, and the judgement is that a reporter exposing lies by a TV station is not protected under the act. Fox does not admit that they were distorting the news, but chose to fight on procedural grounds rather than on the facts, which is pretty standard legal tactics.