It turns out that I'm not impressed with "we still have a deficit, but it's smaller than under the previous administration". No budget that runs at a deficit is acceptable.

Who cares if you’re impressed when you’ve fallen for propaganda (I guess maybe politicians care).

“No budget that runs at a deficit is acceptable”

Why not? Deficits can be healthy and safe when they’re managed. Literally most persons, businesses, and governments use debt. It helps manage purchases over time, and it’s an inflationary hedge.

The idea that “any deficit is bad” was literally pushed as propaganda to make you fatalistic about managing the deficit. As said, one party raises it, one party lowers it, and the party that raises it claims that lowering it to anything but zero is “just as bad” as their runaway debt growth. Propaganda.

That is an amazingly flawed idea. By that reasoning, only a neutral budget is acceptable, and a positive debt surplus a boon. Unfortunately, the opposite is empirically true: the only places running total budget surpluses tend to be undemocratic shitholes because they need to promise nothing and do not rely upon the consent of the governed to loan them savings and pay them taxes.

That is quite beside the point that sovereign debt is considered one of the safest places to store savings and by diminishing the stockpile of debt with a budget in surplus one is diminishing the economy’s ability to save at a low risk level.

If you keep shrinking it then eventually it will go away. The only reason it hasn’t gone to zero is that the shrinking keeps getting interrupted.

Well, the goal is not to impress HN user bigstrat2003. The goal is to have a government and country that continue to function. A fiscal deficit by itself is not a bad thing, and I suspect you would have an extraordinarily difficult time coming up with coherent arguments to the contrary.

1. They’re unable to get enough support to pass more taxes (yet), so “balancing the budget” after republicans lower them on the rich would mean killing people by cutting services.

2. The vast majority of our spending is not discretionary, anyway. You can’t refinance social security.

3. Democrats held the executive for the past two recession recoveries, and spent accordingly at the advice of new school economists. Which worked both times, BTW.

4. The government’s budget is not like a household budget — a deficit isn’t necessarily a terrible thing. Obviously the current situation is absurd, but we should also avoid simplifying complex matters of state like libertarians do with ethics just to avoid hard conversations.

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