Overkill?

Niall Ferguson worries:

The policy mistake has already been made – to adopt the fiscal policy of a world war to fight a recession. In the absence of credible commitments to end the chronic US structural deficit, there will be further upward pressure on interest rates, despite the glut of global savings.

I give Obama a year to find some way to address long-term structural deficits, i.e. entitlement spending, far beyond the healthcare savings he is unpersuasively hyping. As cap and trade also seems gutted of any real income stream, the priority is more urgent. Noam Scheiber responds here.