re: #361 Targetpractice

The writer of that piece did a poor job, too. Really didn’t grasp the whole point of budgets and why governments want to balance them, or why governments borrow money.

What a balanced budget will do for a nation is to help that nation command a lower interest rate on borrowed money. However, there is no reason for a nation to avoid borrowing money per se. The idea is that any nation that is growing (and that is at its base related to population growth), such as the US has been for many decades, is a good credit risk as long as that nation demonstrates that it will make its debt payments (as the US has always done.)

Only nations in decline, such as Japan, Russia, Italy, etc. have the fundamental problem of not having enough workers to generate the GDP to pay off debt. The US doesn’t have that problem.

The US has a tax policy problem - taxes are too low for the expectations we have for and from our society.