View From a Height Commentary from the Mile High City |
Tuesday, August 03, 2004
Debt Differences EmergeMuch has been made of the notion that Bob Schaffer and Pete Coors different primarily in personality and temperment. But in dueling thumbnail sketches in today's Boulder Colorado Daily, some differences emerge on the question of the national debt and the federal deficit.
And here's Schaffer:
Schaffer clearly comes across as a deficit hawk, where Coors, while fiscally conservative, understands that as the national economy grows, so will its debt. The question is, does the deficit grow faster than the economy, and does the debt grow as a fraction of the economy? Both these positions are defensible, although there is some suspicion that our recession was amplified by the attempt to pay down debt. (Nobody really believes that deficits by themselves will drive up interest rates, anymore.) Coors's problem is that while he may be right, nobody believes him. That is, Colorado is a fiscally conservative state, in the true sense of the word, meaning low spending and low taxes. That Salazar has been calling himself a fiscal conservative when all he wants to do is raise taxes to cover the deficit just shows the power of the idea here. It's the state of TABOR and the Gallagher Amendment, even if it's also the state of Amendment 23. Coors's position may be correct economically, but it's also going to take a lot of voter education to bring people around. |
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