Deficit terrorists mean destruction - graph shows this

Post Reply New Topic

All right, take a look at the Domestic Private Surplus graph and the Public Deficit graphs for the United States. See how their movements match nearly perfectly. When the Public Deficit goes up, the Private Surplus goes up, and vice-versa.

If the Deficit Terrorists have their way, the private surplus will be raided dry - to balance the budget, the people will not have money... simple as that. This is why deficit terrorism is wrong and evil.

You are not getting something for nothing. All that surplus is going to be gone when the deficit has to be repaid.

It will not be repaid. It will be repudiated.

(Mr. Rogers voice/on). Can you say bankrupt? Sure you can? (Mr. Rogers voice/off).


ruveyn

No, the debt will simply be rolled over as it has been since Van Buren. There's no drama here. The deficit must exist as long as there is a trade deficit, otherwise the private sector has to take the debt... to get rid of the deficit, the trade deficit must end. Still, getting rid of the deficit in due course is not an absolute requirement as there always will be net importers and net exporters, no one can have perfectly balanced trade.

The deficit terrorists want to pillage the private side of the economy and drown it in debt. The Clinton-Gingrich surplus was a disaster and a recession followed it quickly.

A government trying to fight a national deficit by cutting spending during a major economic recession/depression is a bit like a pilot trying to fight the loss of altitude during a full-scale stall by pulling back on the yoke. In both cases the instinctual knee-jerk reaction is dead wrong. Defecit fear mongering and tight-fistedness only stands to make matters much much worse. Reducing unemployment MUST BE the first priority.

I find it funny how so many deficit fetishists are completely unable to seperate the cyclical deficit (which is higher under Obama then Bush precisely because Obama's in a reccessionary period) and the structural deficit (which is the persistent deficit and has been high since the 1980s).

The solution to reduce the size of deficit is always to have more jobs and more people paying taxes and fewer people drawing benefits to live. So when so-called deficit hawks believe in maintaining a Reserve Army of Labour to keep profits up this shows they are not serious. Policies that create more joblessness also show a lack of seriousness. In the end, there will have to be some deficit as long as there's a trade deficit anyway.

In the end, the deficit doesn't really matter. In Japan half of the debt is held by the Japanese central bank. The US and any other country can do likewise. The world's wealthy can't hold any of these governments hostage, despite common belief to the contrary.

One thing I cannot really comprehend, no matter how hard I try, is how people think that a policy of kicking people off the mob will square up with a consumer based economy where people need their incomes to buy the stuff that only a subset of the population make? How does one arrange a just access to the goods and services of the society without destroying the will to do something useful and to be a productive person in the social context?

It beats me. There has to be a way of giving access to the abundance of goods produced without turning people into bums and shirk-work types. Socialism is not the answer. It will create a class of habitual parasites. In every country where a total command economy (or nearly total) was imposed the economy failed and people spent a third of their waking hours standing in line to for government issued crumbs.

Apparently full bore laissez faire is not the answer either.

ruveyn