BALANCING THE BUDGET

Though I am a social libertarian, I am "reasonably" conservative on the Federal Budget as I follow Maynard Keynes in that the government should balance the budget over the period of a business cycle.  Therefore, if the economy is as good as we are told, we should be well into paying off the Federal debt now, but instead we got a tax cut for the wealth creating a huge Federal deficits.

Both Parties seem to have abandoned balancing the budget, no matter what they say. Conservatives never seem to get enough national defense so, in order to get large increases in the defense budget, liberals insist on getting increased social benefits. Conservative more than anything want tax cuts for wealthy people and perhaps business so they are willing for the government to go deeply into debt to get tax cuts as it did with the 2017 tax cut at peak economic performance (by Trump) and during the Middle East Wars of Bush-43 that also financed the wars with National Debt.

Conservatives, of course, are willing to cut benefits to the poor. They feel that, contrary to the data, that poor people should get a job whereas most poor people do have jobs (some would like to do away with the minimum wage). Of course, children don’t have paid jobs (seemingly some would like to do away with the child labor laws).*  At the same time they feel that workers are overpaid. Thus the working poor seem to get more and more behind and the working middle class is losing ground.

Conservatives like to say they are Christians, but they seem to have missed the part that Jesus was all about helping the poor.**

There is not all bad news. Economists tell us that, if the rate of increase in the deficit is less than the rate of increase in GDP, we could run increasing debt forever. Japan has gone this a couple steps further and blown the increase in debt way above their increase in GDP. They have done this for years and can do this apparently because nearly all their debt is internal.

The US debt is bought about 28% externally as I recall so I don’t know if we could get by doing the Japan course. In fact the problem in the Third World is external which keeps them in trouble as they owe the money to others who want to be paid.

* There are 16.4 million American children living in poverty. That’s nearly one quarter (22.6 percent) of all of our children. More alarming is that the percentage of poor children has climbed by 4.5 percent since the start of the Great Recession in 2007. And poor means poor. For a family of three with one child under 18, the poverty line is $18,400.  [December 2017]
(https://www.huffpost.com/entry/americas-greatest-shame-c_b_4238566 )
** I have written before about Jesus and the poor and found a passage saying that poor and poverty are mentioned 446 times in 386 passages in the Bible (http://stopcontinentaldrift.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-poor-in-bible.html)