295 Growing Out of Deficits

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Personally, I'm with Dick Cheney on one thing: deficits don't matter, but because all the economics most people understand is the erroneous assumption that it's something like balancing their home budget, demagoging politicians use the deficit stalking-horse to gin up outrage & condemnation. This has created a cottage industry of those self-same politicians offering hair-brained theories on how their pet-proposal will make those evil deficits magically go away, without any conscious effort. They say American will simply grow out of them, with the added side-advantage that The Rich will get richer.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">As obvious as it may sound, no one can tell the future. Since we can’t tell the future, all we can do is predict from past experience as engineers do. Engineers are partial to finding an equation that fits past data, plug in an unknown, and see if the results meet their expectations. For example, if engineers used U.S. budgetary data since Reaganomics kicked in during the early 1980s, they would expect the National Debt to continue to increase because it always has. Obviously, apologist economists, from either political Party, aren’t engineers because they say whatever swill they're selling will cause tax receipts to dramatically increase, taking care of all our budget woes. Never mind that during the roaring 1990s when America was awash with big money, there weren’t enough tax receipts. Never mind that no scenario in our past points to dramatic government revenue increases. Yet still, ideological-driven politicians put their fingers on their foreheads, closes their eyes, grimace sincerely, and tell us that everything is fine, we can depend on America “growing” out of its financial difficulties. Always the same proposed solution, always the same answer: a ballooning National Debt. But like I said, deficits don't matter, whatever causes the next economic collapse, it won't be federal bankruptcy.</p>