To the Editor:
David Brooks’s summation that “the next president has to do three big things, which are in tension with one another: increase growth, reduce debt and increase social equity” would have been as apt in 1932 as it is in 2012.
Those of us out here in the “reality-based community” who insist on learning from our history recognize that the way to achieve these things is through Keynesian deficit spending in the crisis years and repaying that debt in the good times.
Since the power to tax and the power to spend don’t belong to our executive, the way to get there — now, as then — is to elect not only a Democratic president, but a Democratic Congress as well.
BARRY HASKELL LEVINE
Lafayette, Calif., Sept. 7, 2012