On the Today programme yesterday, Nick Clegg said (2'11 in):

You've got a Labour party that of course famously refuses to talk about the economy, a leader that failed to even address ther deficit.

Hold on. Labour has been banging on for months about the cost of living crisis. Sure, Miliband "forgot" to talk about the deficit in his conference speech. but the deficit is - of course - not the economy.

Then on PM yesterday (about 17'402 in), Carolyn Quinn said:

The Lib Dems claim they'd fix the economy more fairly than the Tories; they'd eliminate the deficit not just by cutting spending as the Tories promise but by raising taxes on the rich.

In the context she's using the word, she clearly means not "fix the economy" but "fix the deficit".

Now, I had thought that Clegg had merely mis-spoke. But it's unlikely that two people would mis-speak in exactly the same way within hours of each other. I suspect something else is going on - the construction of a hyperreality.

They are trying to equate the deficit with the economy, to give the impression that good economic policy consists not in boosting real wages, cutting unemployment, or addressing the threat of secular stagnation but merely in "fixing the deficit." The fact that Clegg is a politician and Quinn a journalist is, in this context, a distinction without a difference; they are both in the same Bubble pushing the same quack mediamacro.

Worse still, by "fixing the deficit" they mean some type of austerity. But there's a big difference between the two. We could - perhaps - fix the deficit by state-contingent fiscal rules, or by adopting a higher inflation target (or NGDP target) and thus using monetary stimulus to inflate our way out of government debt. However, even these options are outside the Overton window.

Instead, the only economic policy permitted by the Bubble is the fake machismo of "tough choices." Not only are these tough only for other people - mostly the most vulnerable - but they don't even work in their own terms; one lesson we've learned since 2010 is that "tough decisions" to cut the deficit don't actually do so as much as their perpetrators hope. But then, in the Bubble's hyperreality, neither justice nor evidence count for anything.