Stupid thing successful

Congress this year made sure that the government spent a lot less this year. As a result (and pretty logically, really), this year’s deficit is expected to dip below a trillion dollars for the first time since the economic crisis:

The Treasury Department forecast Monday that the budget deficit for fiscal 2012 will come in at $996 billion, the first time President Obama has presided over an annual deficit of less than $1 trillion.

The budget deficit in fiscal 2011 and 2010 was $1.3 trillion, while the Obama stimulus law pushed the deficit up to $1.4 trillion in fiscal 2009.

For people who care about such things, this would be good news. Look! The deficit is shrinking!

Now, sure, today’s economic news—record low new unemployment claims and reports showing expanding manufacturing— was pretty good. But it isn’t great. It’s nowhere cheery enough to point to getting out of the slump anytime soon.

We could be borrowing money at negative interest rates (yes, that means if I borrow a dollar today, I have to pay back less than a dollar later) to invest in infrastructure that we need to build. Our roads are shit, our bridges are shit, our railroads are shit, our Internet is shit, our schools are shit, our airways are shit. Some day or an other we are going to have to fix them. It would actually be the cheapest to do it now, because borrowing is so cheap and labor (due to the employment crisis) is the cheapest it will probably ever be. It would put people to work, we’d get some much-needed infrastructure (the things that make an economy possible), and now would be cheaper than later.

But no. The deficit is the most important thing. So, good news!

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