Demanding a federal budget that is fair, responsible, and meets our nation's priorities

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Deficits: Who Are the Real Maniacs?

At the Agenda for Shared Prosperity's "Beyond Balanced Budget Mania" forum earlier this month, Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz gave a much-discussed 30,000-mile aerial perspective on how to look at and evaluate deficits and what we are buying with them:

[W]e shouldn't focus on deficits themselves. What really matters is the country's balance sheet, its assets and its liabilities. Consider a company. You would never say, oh, this company is borrowing a lot and therefore, it is a bad company. You would always say what is it borrowing for? Is it for investment? You want to look at both its assets and its liabilities. You want to look at its balance sheet. Well, when we talk about the deficit, we're talking about only one part of that balance sheet. We're talking about what's happening to the liabilities, what it owes, but not to what it's spending the money on.

Perhaps implicit in Stiglitz' view is an acknowledgement of the borrowing costs of deficit financing as a liability. Or maybe he is ignoring it, which I think many who recoil at Dick Cheney's "Deficits Don't Matter" mantra are, oddly, willing to do; some progressives even perceive a deficit 'mania.' In the current political environment -- or until the next election -- the deficit-indifferent are (often tacitly) applauding the leveraging our national resources to support the policy priorities of the administration:

And if you are borrowing money, which the United States has done, to finance a war in Iraq or to finance a tax cut for upper-income Americans, then the country is being left worse off. The balance sheet does look worse. You have a liability, but you don't have any asset on the other side. But if you are borrowing money to invest in education, technology, or, say, the safety net, then you may have a stronger economy.

By the time he leaves office, President Bush will leave us paying upward of $50 billion more a year in deficit financing costs than when he took office. And for what?