Summing up.

AT THE DEPTH of the 1982 recession, seemingly sane people were actually screaming that we needed a big tax increase to stop the slump-just as in 1932. 1 then went around asking, "Where are the Keynesians when you really need them?" Well, in this symposium not only the Keynesians but just about everyone else defended the pass against tax hikes.

Robert Eisner reasons that insofar as there have lately been more real government debts after inflation is taken into account, there have also been more real government assets. In that sense, the deficit may be a statistical illusion. Illusion or not, Robert Bartley sees it as the only restraint on congressional spending we have. John Makin points out that simply keeping federal spending growing at the same pace as the past three years could balance the budget by the end of George Bush's first term. Allan Meltzer remarks that "the major problem is that excessive concern about the deficit will convince the public that we must have higher taxes." And Robert Barro concludes that the most important difference between deficits and taxes is that the taxes are sure to be permanent-and so the real debate is about the size of government.

This collective analysis was unwittingly confirmed by Kenneth Arrow of Stanford, who explained the case for Hg ever-increasing taxes in the New York Times (Oct. 16). "Without raising taxes," said Arrow, "you have to make decisions about which programs are more important than others . . ." Indeed. But is that really too much to ask?

Brian Reading is the odd man out in this survey. He is a twin-deficit man and no mistake. He blames the October 1987 stock-market crash primarily on the U.S. budget deficit. Yet if Mr. Reading is isolated in our academic symposium, he represents a considerable body of opinion among international bankers, Wall Street, and the media. An explanation of this division of opinion was furnished long ago by Keynes: "Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt ftom any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist." The "Practical men" of Wall Street and CBS reflect the defunct economic view of a decade ago; academic opinion has observed and drawn lessons from the remarkable economic experiences of the last eight years.

Montagu Norman, Keynes's celebrated critic, famously remarked: "The dogs may bark but the caravan moves on." What he did not take into account was that when the caravan of economic scholarship had moved on, the dogs would continue emitting their favorite barks regardless. They are barking today on and to the National Economic Commission. Our symposium confronts the Commission with a painful dilemma: either plagiarize liberally or slip unobtrusively into one of those footnotes of economic histor reserved for the peddlers of conventional unwisdom.