With the failure of the most obvious of stimulus measures, extending unemployment benefits, on Capitol Hill, a new sub-genre of fiscal conservatives who want to spend now has emerged in opinion-making circles. David Brooks, who doesn’t understand economics, edged toward that in a column that argued against stimulus spending, saying he supported extending unemployment insurance and aid to cash-strapped states. Others have gone further. Howard Gleckman recounted the stupidity of paying for the UI extension:

I’d be more sympathetic with these new converts to fiscal responsibility if they were as enthusiastic about paying for extending $32 billion worth of special interest tax breaks as they are about funding the unemployment extension. If I understand correctly, these lawmakers insist that Congress fund every dime of added jobless aid, which nearly all analysts agree will help boost the economy. But they feel no need to pay for continuing these special interest tax breaks, which will not. They fret about unemployed workers who allegedly game the system to get jobless benefits but seem undisturbed by those businesses and individuals who do the same to maximize their tax subsidies. Politics is indeed a funny business.

And Matt Miller, the very model of a modern squishy neoliberal, makes the case for spending now after promising his readers, really, that he’s not one of THOSE liberals:

I got into policy journalism in the late 1980s and government in the early 1990s because of my worries about debt and deficits. I was a warrior for “generational equity” back when I was still (sigh) a member of the younger generation. And I’m as fearful as the next fiscal scold of long-term damage from the gap between federal spending and revenue, not to mention the trillions in unfunded liabilities in public employee pensions at the state and local level.

I come before you, in other words, a deficit hawk to the core. But it is the height of economic folly — and socially dangerous, in my view — to elevate deficit reduction as a goal today over boosting jobs and growth. Especially when there are ways to goose the economy while at the same time legislating changes that move us toward fiscal sanity once we’re past this stagnation.

We need a nickname for this group of bone-throwers. OK, how about the Bone Throwers. They insist that they’re the REAL fiscal conservatives, but they understand the inconvenience of the current situation, and they support the bare minimum allowable in elite circles to prevent, I don’t know, starvation, or a tough time eluding beggars when they cross the street.

The Bone Throwers aren’t really helping. They might succeed in getting unemployment benefits extended, but they foreground their opinions in the language of fiscal responsibility and never let anyone forget about the urgent need to pivot to deficit reduction. In fact, the word “deficit” never strays far from their calls for additional spending. It ensures yet another stimulus package, if there is any, too small to the task at hand. It ensures an early pivot away from the kind of support needed for the economy. It values “calming the markets” over, I don’t know, feeding people. It’s a recipe for bad policy because it’s based more on illusions and ghosts than fixing the problem.

If we’re going to take a step down from pure stimulus, I’d much rather embrace Christopher Edley’s idea of having states borrow from the Treasury Department against future matching grants, a low-cost option to break the vicious cycle of state and local cutbacks during a recession. In fact, this isn’t too different from the 30-10 initiative proposed by Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, to get an advance on a sales tax increase to pay for mass transit projects. It offers government stimulus in the short term for worthwhile initiatives, creates jobs and eliminates the prospect of anti-stimulus.

If this were only a debate between Bone Throwers and Keynesians, that would be one thing. But the dominant opinion in Washington remains deficit-focused and deficit-obsessed, and the Bone Throwers only serve to create a mythical middle as the Very Serious Position. That results in bad policy that pleases nobody and leaves the nation in a not much better state afterwards. Is it any wonder people like Matt Miller held sway in the Democratic Party in the early 1990s, right before the Republican Revolution?