{"id":2491,"date":"2015-10-17T16:07:47","date_gmt":"2015-10-17T21:07:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/?p=2491"},"modified":"2015-10-17T16:07:47","modified_gmt":"2015-10-17T21:07:47","slug":"what-does-the-us-budget-deficit-mean","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/2015\/10\/17\/what-does-the-us-budget-deficit-mean\/","title":{"rendered":"What Does the US Budget Deficit Mean?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Steve Benen @ MaddowBlog<\/strong><\/em> comes up with a chart<\/a> of Obama-era budget deficits:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

and notes,<\/p>\n

In the not-too-distant past, talk in the political world of the U.S. budget deficit was all the rage. As the Tea Party \u201cmovement\u201d took shape, conservatives quite literally took to the streets to express their fear that President Obama and Democrats were failing to address the \u201cout of control\u201d deficit.<\/p>\n

Congressional Republicans agreed. As recently as 2013, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) was asked about the radicalism of his political agenda and he responded, \u201c[W]hat I would say is extreme is a trillion-dollar deficit every year.\u201d Around the same time, then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) argued that Congress should be \u201cfocused on trying to deal with the ultimate problem, which is this growing deficit.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Republican rhetoric was ridiculously wrong. We don\u2019t have a trillion-dollar deficit; the deficit isn\u2019t the ultimate problem; and it\u2019s not growing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Which is interesting, but fails to note that the Executive doesn’t make major spending decisions – Congress does.\u00a0 All the Executive does is propose a budget, which may be ignored by Congress.\u00a0 Veto threats are the only direct negotiating tactic available to the Executive.\u00a0 The two red bars indicate when the Democrats also held Congress; the budget deficit is highest in the second year.\u00a0 Then the GOP takes control of Congress and the deficits fall.<\/p>\n

A naive observation, of course; Obama had to clean up the mess left by one of the worst Administrations in recent memory, and the announcement of a continual presence in Afghanistan<\/a> reflects the magnitude of the disaster of the last GOP Administration.\u00a0 The chart is virtually meaningless, which Benen implicitly admits:<\/p>\n

To reiterate a point that bears repeating, I don\u2019t necessarily consider this sharp reduction in the deficit to be good news. If it were up to me, federal officials would be borrowing more<\/em>, not less, taking advantage of low interest rates, investing heavily in infrastructure and economic development, creating millions of jobs, and leaving deficit reduction for another day.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And I agree.\u00a0 The Government is not expected to run at a profit.\u00a0 The Government is not a business<\/a>.\u00a0 Its purpose is to govern, with all that implies.\u00a0 Our crumbling public works is a dangerous situation, and will result in changes perhaps unwelcome by the American public, as noted<\/a> by my contributing blogger, Chris Johnson.\u00a0 It would benefit all of us greatly to take advantage of the low interest rates to fund the repair of roads and bridges, plumbing and national parks.<\/p>\n

But to the group that believes everything is economic, the chart will be important, even if the interpretation is open to wide debate.\u00a0 Add in the GOP’s relentless push to increase Dept of War funding without raising taxes, and the cognitive dissonance becomes quite entertaining.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Steve Benen @ MaddowBlog comes up with a chart of Obama-era budget deficits: and notes, In the not-too-distant past, talk in the political world of the U.S. budget deficit was all the rage. As the Tea Party \u201cmovement\u201d took shape, conservatives quite literally took to the streets to express their \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2491","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2491","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2491"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2491\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2501,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2491\/revisions\/2501"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2491"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}