What job experience would you like to see in a Presidential candidate?

[Pat Mustard]

Balanced budgets are the last thing a country needs.  In good times the money coming in will be more than going out, in bad times governments should use deficit spending to mind the poorest and stimulate growth.

At all times debt should be used to fund infrastructure projects.  But debt is rarely a problem for governments if return on investment is greater than one to one.  For projects governments should involve themselces in, eg education, health, infrastructure, public transport, environment management roi is always better than one to one, often returning more than €10 for each one spent long term.

The biggest problem with modern macroeconomis is that it assumes state debt is like household debt, and therefore has a low ceiling of utility.  It doesn't, and even less so when the state prints its own specie and that is generally trusted.

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Balanced budget laws have one goal, to cut state spending so that there are only two options for necessary projects, either go without or get in private companies.  In the las 100 years there has not been one public good or service delivered by privite companies which wasn't far worse and far more costly than the state doing the same job (and I include stuff like electricity &heating in this).  Letting the job go undone is a worse outcome yet.

Your post reads like you were scanning an article about Modern Monetary Theory while smoking pot. I loved that bit about the 'biggest problem with modern macroeconomics is that it assumes that state debt is like household debt'. No, that's not the biggest problem. It's just a common misconception. If there is a 'biggest problem' with our current theory of economics, it is probably its dependence on continuous growth. One of the biggest problems with massive state debt is that during periods of low growth, the massive debt becomes the primary source of income for the very wealthy. So in a period of slow growth with high state debt, workers must be taxed heavily to pay interest on the debt to the wealthy. You end up with something like the French Second Estate or the British Aristocracy. So growth is the only thing standing between us and feudalism. 

I am not saying that deficit spending is bad. I'm just saying that it is pretty silly to have such a casual attitude toward it.

Lad, I don't need to be lectured at by an illiterate.