Obama Blasts Mitt Romney's Debate Candor: 'You Owe The American People The Truth'

At one point, Romney was able to trap the President on the subject of deficits (“You’ve been president four years. You said you’d cut the deficit in half. It’s now four years later. We still have trillion-dollar deficits.”), which is only possible because of the way a Democratic President holds deficit-cutting as a virtue and refuses to point out that this is precisely the wrong thing to do in the midst of mass unemployment.

And this discourse gets narrowed, frankly, because there’s a massive political machine dedicated to narrowing it. These things don’t just happen by accident. Someone has to pay the bills to promote the rise of austerity economics:

Billionaire private equity mogul Peter Peterson is investing millions of dollars in a new Washington-based campaign for austerity, planning to blanket the airwaves after the election to bolster the case for a “grand bargain” in Congress’ lame-duck session that would slash Medicare and Social Security spending in exchange for new tax revenue.


The new Campaign to Fix the Debt is chaired by former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, a Democrat, and former New Hampshire Sen. Judd Gregg, a Republican. It’s priming for lame-duck negotiations over the expirations of the payroll tax cut and the Bush tax cuts, as well as scheduled cuts to defense and non-defense spending.


Peterson’s allies aren’t waiting for the election, however. In New Hampshire, the co-chairmen of the 2010 Simpson-Bowles commission — former GOP Sen. Alan Simpson and former Clinton White House official Erskine Bowles — have endorsed incumbent Republican Rep. Charlie Bass, who supported a budget bill with many of their austerity recommendations, over progressive Democrat Annie Kuster. Bowles and Simpson have become fashionable politically, so Bass is taking full advantage of their endorsement, running full-page ads in newspapers across the state [...]

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