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“The budget deficit is coming and it’s going to eat your children!” I’m sure it will not be long before we see this line in a Washington Post news story.

In an otherwise reasonable editorial urging that the dollar bill be replaced by a coin to cut down on printing costs, the Post referred to “the country’s financial emergency.” Yes, that would be the crisis that has driven the interest rate on 10-year Treasury bonds to 2.4 percent.

The Washington Post and much of the rest of the media are doing their best to scare people about budget deficits, but the facts are stubbornly refusing to cooperate. The country does face an emergency. It is tens of millions of people suffering from unemployment or underemployment. This is the direct result of the fact that the people running the economy were too inept to notice an $8 trillion housing bubble before it burst and too incompetent to respond adequately after it burst. The obsessive distraction with budget deficits is a big part of both stories.