A National Debate Being Conducted Under False Premises

As American voters left their polling places in November, thousands were asked to describe the state of the nation's economy. Fifty-three percent said they thought it was "not good." Another 37 percent said it was "poor." Asked to name the most important issue facing the country, 63 percent said "the economy."

The latest New York Times/CBS News opinion survey updated those figures last week. Seventy-four percent said the state of the economy either was "fairly bad" or "very bad." The most important issue facing the country? "Jobs," said 28 percent. "The economy," said another 23 percent.

A whopping 6 percent named "health care" as the most important issue, and an equally whopping 6 percent cited the federal "budget deficit."

And what has the new House Republican leadership focused on in its first two weeks? Health care and the deficit.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., explained his party's priorities on NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday. "What the people have said is 'Enough. We've got to shrink government. We've got to cut spending,'" Mr. Cantor said.

Actually, if exit polls are to be believed, what the people said in November was that they were dissatisfied with the slow pace of recovery from the Great Recession and with how little of that recovery they and their families have felt. Mr. Cantor and his colleagues have yet to demonstrate that eliminating government services will improve either condition.

Nor did voters say anything about falling back into the culture wars of the 1990s. Yet on Thursday, the House's conservative Republican Study Committee exhumed ancient attacks on public broadcasting, the national endowments for the arts and humanities, family planning, the AmeriCorps youth-service program, energy-efficiency labeling and more, all under the cover of attacking the budget deficit.

"I have never seen the American public more receptive, more ready," explained Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, chairman of the study group, "for the tough-love measures that need to be taken to help fix the country."

It's a fair bet that the parents of America did not send more Republicans to Washington to snatch Grover, Big Bird and Elmo away from their kids, even if it would fix the country.

The Democrats have themselves to blame for a stunning inability to explain clearly what they're doing, why it's important and how it will help Americans.

The result is a policy debate now taking place on false premises. Legitimate concerns about the cumulative effect of long-term deficits, for example, have been hyped into unreasonable fears of short-term deficits, which actually have helped save thousands of jobs and allowed states and local governments to maintain essential services to their residents.

Even so, Americans are savvier than the Republican leadership and the more strident of its Tea Party allies seem to believe. In the latest NYT/CBS survey, an overwhelming majority of Americans — 75 percent — said deficits are all right when they are kept manageable or when they are needed to respond to emergencies.

And when asked what they feared the effect of excessive deficits might be, 26 percent cited a future loss of jobs, while another 16 percent said they feared the loss of government services.

People value government services. They realize that public workers plow the snow, pick up the trash, teach our children, fight our fires and keep our neighborhoods and business districts safe.

They know that potholes don't fill themselves, crumbling bridges don't pour their own new concrete and new pipes don't magically appear in the ground to deliver clean water and dispose of sewage when old pipes fail. They know it takes money to protect our food, water and air from contamination; preserve the glory of our national parks for future generations; and train and maintain the soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines who ensure our national security.

The people even understand that the men and women who perform government services — in both the public and private sectors, by the way — recycle their earnings many times over by buying the homes, cars, clothes, health and life insurance, groceries, plywood, iPhones, toothpaste and mutual funds that fuel America's economic engine.

The new Congress has been wasting time pandering to the fringe. It needs to get serious about November's mandate from the middle. Voters sent more Republicans to Washington to work with Democrats to accelerate the economic recovery and increase its impact on the ordinary people who need it.

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