There are tons of spelling errors in this article. I feel compelled to criticize something because I hate Noah Smith on a personal level, but am chagrinned to f

There are tons of spelling errors in this article. I feel compelled to criticize something because I hate Noah Smith on a personal level, but am chagrinned to find that I generally agree with most of the arguments that he makes here along with his interpretation of the history. The only thing deficient here was that he could have improved his argument by extending it backwards a bit to the malignant continuity between JFK (you'll really trigger the boomers with that one), LBJ, and Nixon in terms of creating long-term fiscal problems for the US. To throw a bone to a side that I usually disagree with, Smith could have also productively contrasted that latter century bipartisan fiscal irresponsibility with the relative sobriety of the New Deal just in terms of deficits and long term sustainability. It may seem weird on the face of it given how the New Deal tends to be portrayed in contemporary times by both the left and the right, but FDR might have been the last real fiscal conservative of the 20th century both in terms of rhetoric and policy until Bill Clinton closed out the millennium. Despite what seemed to be bitter acrimony during the Clinton administration, the Reagan-Clinton years were probably the last ones in which there was a productive competitive dynamic between both parties. It was also the last time in my memory that there was serious discussion of entitlement reform: that was really wiped out from public debate after 9/11. Back then, you could credibly argue that the competition between the parties resulted in better policy thinking on both sides. In contemporary times the competition seems more to result in more aggressive stupidity on both sides: they both tend to make each other dumber to own the cons/libs at the expense of the public. Gives me a bad taste in my mouth to have to say something nice about a Noah Smith article.