A Call for Moderation

Here is a bit from a post by Paul Krugman on his NY Times blog calling for people to acknowledge there are shades of gray. Sadly US politics and intellectual discussion has gone black-or-white. Fanaticism is the result. Krugman is wisely calling people back to make moderate, sensible judgements where you acknowledge that the world doesn't lie at extremes but lies in the muddly details in the middle.

Just a thought suggested by some economic discussions I’ve followed, including the comments on this blog: many people seem to have a hard time accepting that there are intermediate positions, in particular that you can question free-market, hard-money dogma without being a wild man. To say that some inflation can sometimes be a good thing does not mean advocating hyperinflation; to call for deficit spending in slumps does not mean saying that debt and deficits never matter; and so on.

I watched ABC's This Weeks this morning and was stunned by how their panelists all assumed that it was normal politics to push the US raising of the debt ceiling to be "normal" politics. Bizarre.

Nobody pointed out the obvious. That a debt ceiling and deficits are not really connected. That is you want to solve a problem you don't demand that all problems be solved simulataneously. Nobody seemed to understand that the appropriate moderate position would be to recognize that there is a "long term" need for government to be solvent and live within its means, but right now the issue is meeting obligations to creditors which has nothing to do with solvency or creating new spending initiatives or even fixing old spending initiatives.

What I find truly astounding is that these black-or-white minds can't see the need for short term debt to shore up an economy so that long term debt can be addressed in the next few years. Instead, I saw a lot of grave faces saying that the US will have to actually go to the brink and "shake up" financial markets before there is "enough of a crisis" to motivate the politicians to get serious about passing a new debt ceiling. Insane!

This bit in the post is worth contemplating:

I really do worry about the state of reading comprehension. Or maybe it’s just that extremists can’t grasp the notion of non-extreme positions held by other people.

Where is the pragmatism of doing first things first and attacking problems one-by-one?