Brad DeLong is usually a level-headed, temperate fellow. But now, he says, he finds himself increasingly bitter and angry.
He is angry, in part, because he is an economist and therefore sees with greater perception and acuity the utter recklessness and foolishness of the current administration's economic policies.
He is angry, in part, because he believes in fiscal sanity, and ours has quickly become a time of fiscal insanity.
But most of all, he is angry because he is a patriot, and it is the duty of patriots to be angry when the greatness of a great nation is greatly reduced by careless men:
Why do so many of us who worked so hard on economic policy for the Clinton administration, and who think of ourselves as mostly part of a sane and bipartisan center, find the Bush administration and its Republican congressional lapdogs so… disgusting, loathsome, contemptible? Why are we so bitter?
After introspection, the answer for me at least as clear. We worked very hard for years to repair the damage that Ronald Reagan and company had done to America's fisc. We strained every nerve and muscle to find politically-possible and popularly-palatable ways to close the deficit, and put us in a position in which we can at least begin to think about the generational long-run problems of financing the retirement of the baby-boom generation and dealing with the rapidly-rising capabilities and costs of medicine. We saw a potential fiscal train wreck far off in the future, and didn't ignore it, didn't shrug our shoulders, didn't assume that it would be someone else's problem, but rolled up our sleeves and set to work.
Then the Bush people come in. And in two and a half years they trash the place. They trash the place deliberately. They trash the place casually. They trash the place gleefully. They undo our work for no reason at all — just for the hell of it.
The place has been trashed and if, like DeLong, you love the place, this makes you angry.
Bonus points to DeLong for simultaneously taking a sly swipe at David Broder's Beltway snobbery and evoking F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. The benedictory conclusion of Gatsby remains heartbreakingly relevant for anyone who takes an honest look at the fiscal, social, environmental and international condition of this country after the incumbent president's first three years in office:
I couldn't forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made. …
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