Josh Barro notes that conservatives have been yammering away about “uncertainty” for the past couple of years, insisting that things like liberal health care reform rules and new financial regulations are causing investment to seize up until the future is clearer. But not anymore:
Isn’t it odd that we’re not hearing it in regard to the debt limit negotiations? A debt limit standoff certainly fosters uncertainty, discouraging investment and growth….As with any policy, there could be good reasons to manufacture a debt limit impasse despite the uncertainty it creates. (In my view, there aren’t, but there could be.) Still, opponents of a clean debt limit increase need to account for the uncertainty that their preferred policy will foster.
Since I’m not a conservative and I don’t have to pretend to be nice, I’ll provide the obvious answer: nobody ever really believed in this argument in the first place. Financial uncertainty has certainly been the cause of weak investment ever since the Great Collapse, but regulatory uncertainty has never been a big issue one way or the other — and conservatives have known this perfectly well all along. This is why right-wingers who are allegedly allergic to uncertainty can blithely threaten to force a reckless default on U.S. debt unless they get their way on their pet budget issues. It’s because uncertainty has always been a purely political attack, not one grounded in either ideological consistency or empirical evidence. When it outlives its political usefulness, it’s easily discarded.
