No. Look at what I wrote: > b) the specific response was not preordained (for ex: it is not part of the Constitution that rich people must pay lower tax rates

No. Look at what I wrote: > b) the specific response was not preordained (for ex: it is not part of the Constitution that rich people must pay lower tax rates than they did in 1982, that invariant is a policy choice). We did not have to blow up the deficit (as badly) as a result of the GFC. That was a specific set of policy choices that the Bush team made, in part to preserve the capital gains tax cuts and low corporate tax rates. (If a corporation is a person for some purposes under the law and can claim some personhood rights, why are they not subject to the person's tax code?) It is also a policy choice to tax capital gains, chiefly for very rich people, at a lower marginal rate than income earned through other means. It is not in the Constitution that our tax policy must favor the very rich. One could imagine a world in which the response was along the lines that "this is a once-in-a-century crisis, so rich people and corporations will have to make the sacrifice of paying GOP Reagan 1981 tax rates for a few years to help us build a stronger foundation for the future." Notably, CBO did expect (at the time) the Bush budget to increase the federal debt by roughly a third over a decade. It was well known and discussed at the time that the Bush budget would inflate our debt burden. > pushed the deficit to a low % of GDP we’d kill for right now Empirically, we would not. We are allowed to choose the entire composition of the House every two years, a third of the Senate is up for reelection with the same frequency, and the White House every four years. In no election of the last half-century or so has fiscal prudence been a major issue. If we would "kill" to lower the budget deficit, the easy first step would be to not re-elect the president who presided over the largest increase in the deficit in our history (by percentage: W Bush; by $: Trump). As much as one might wish it were otherwise, voters simply do not care.