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.
“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.
> Why not?
The household analogy works for some people because it answers a moral question, not an economic one: Why should government be exempt from rules that individuals must follow?
The development of the household budget idea as a way of reasoning about the the federal government's is as old as economics itself. The Greek word for economics is oikonomia, consisting of - oikos = household - nomos = management
This analogy broke 90 years ago in the US, when, in the aftermath of the great depression, Keynes argued that governments should do things that households cannot: borrow during recessions, spend when private demand collapses, tolerate deficits until recovery. And that these have a beneficial effect on the economy and its participants because government spending becomes someone else's income, essentially injecting demand into the economy.
During the 1970s, US politicians realized that the household budget analogy was an effective rhetorical tool for arguing for fiscal conservatism. Its effectiveness bore no relation to its reflection of present reality. What it did reflect was a set of values: thrift, responsibility, independence, and skepticism of debt. But most of all, it speaks to a sense of justice - that the rules for me were also the rules for thee. The difference that the government plays by a different set of economic constraints than I do is the fundamental tension that the household analogy attempts to address. This is a moral intuition not an economic intuition. The sentiment still holds power today despite it being a bad intuition pump for economic reasoning.
It probably greatly depends on what debt is spent. If it's used for investment to spur further growth, it's entirely different if it's used for consumption. Is government using depth for future growth?
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.
So you don’t understand the concept of sovereignty then.
I’m also not entirely sure how relevant that is due to states (and provinces) not printing their own currency though. Very different situations.
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.