Balancing the Budget

[politicallefty]

I don't support having a balanced budget just for the sake of having a balanced budget. The primary concern with the budget should be what it does to the national debt in relation to the GDP. We should try to maintain the debt at a certain percent of GDP. I think a lot can be done to the budget that would incidentally result in balanced budgets, such as massive reductions in defense spending and increasing overall revenue. In times of economic prosperity, balanced budgets and surpluses are the way to go (like during the final years of the Clinton Administration). I don't forgive the Bush Administration for what it did to the national debt. The budget surpluses should not have gone towards tax cuts for the rich and an obscene defense budget. On the whole, the government should exercise responsible budgeting when the economy is well to allow for significant deficit spending when the economy is in recession (let alone when in actual crisis). What needs to end is an economic policy that concentrates wealth in the super-rich and a defense policy that remains stuck in a Cold War mentality.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

The deficits of the past 30 years have been inefficient because the amount of stimulus Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Obama have created has been minute compared to the growth of the debt.  This is because over the past 30 years our deficit spending has been tied up in garbage: tax credits for the rich, the military-industrial complex, pumping up Wall Street and keeping 90 year olds on life support.  It's stuff that doesn't promote rapid growth and consumption.

$500 billion dollar deficits like we have now are bad, but if we cut and replaced all of our spending with a $500 billion deficit that featured infrastructure spending, education, help for the working class consumer, and small business investment, we could keep that deficit going infinitely.

The military-industrial complex is stimulus too.  It provides lots of jobs.  But you can't count on stimulus spending as self-correcting of the deficit any more than you can of tax cuts.  There is some stimulus spending to be sure that will be effective enough to improve revenues in the future, and some tax cuts that will as well. But it's incredibly difficult to predict what those exact measures will be, and in any case they'll be unlikely to be enough to take care of being half a trillion dollars in the red on an annual basis.

[opebo]

There's no need to balance the budget.

My head almost exploded.

Almost? What need be said to make it actually explode?

lol. It was just a figure of speech. I was basically saying what was said was so painful to logic that my mind either need to be re-examined (which many of you would agree with) or I just have a really hard time understanding it. Can someone explain it to me?

     It's leftist cant. Not much to be explained there.

What the heck are you talking about?  Its common knowledge that the 'balanced budget issue' is nonsense.  I think it was Reagan who first stated that the budget need never be in balance.

[DC Al Fine]

I don't want a surplus. Government debt keeps the volatility of my portfolio down

[TNF]

Destroy all Treasury bonds owed to rich investors.

[courts]

Destroy all Treasury bonds owed to rich investors.