Vote for us, only $1.9 trillion in deficit spending!

Matt Yglesias and Brendan Nyhan are angry at the NYT for drawing a false equivalence between John McCain's plans to increase the debt by $5.7 trillion and the Democrats' plans to increase it by only $1.9 trillion. Ezra Klein is angry at the WaPo for doing the exact same thing.

Yglesias writes:

There's no grounds for saying that two plans' costs have something "in common" when they differ in cost by at least $3.8 trillion, but to understand this you need to understand what you're talking about. After all, if one candidate was offering budget-busting on the Democratic scale, and another candidate was offering $2 trillion in deficit reduction nobody would have trouble distinguishing between the budget hawk and the deficit spender. But the difference in magnitude is the same in either case.

Yes, it's a false equivalence. $5.7 trillion is $3.8 trillion more than $1.9 trillion. If McCain's deficit spending were the size of Jupiter, the Democrats' might only be the size of...um...Uranus. And this argument would hold water, if it was a question between which policy to actually enact.

But the question is which policy to run on. And if you're talking about politics, the sign matters as much as the size. Are the Democrats seriously expecting to run on the motto "Look, we're deficit hawks, we only balloon the debt by $1.9 trillion"???

If it's easy for the WaPo and the NYT to overlook a $3.8 trillion size difference, it'll be easy for the voters too. The Democrats should wise up t this fact, and so should Yglesias and company. To be a deficit hawk you must reduce the debt.