“Balanced budgets” have nothing to do with limited government. Neither does a budget surplus. As with most notions crafted by economists and the budgetary scolds they’ve long enabled, the notion of balanced budgets as inhibitors of big government is a massive fraud.
Yet the idea persists. See a recent Wall Street Journal news account about how we got here, the “here” being budget deficits and debt born of unbalanced budgets. The report indicated that “In 2000, the federal government actually ran a surplus, and the Congressional Budget Office, Capitol Hill’s nonpartisan scorekeeper, projected the Treasury would keep collecting enough revenue to pay for all government programs and generate continuing surpluses.” There’s your fraud, one that the economists inside the CBO and in the profession more broadly have continued to gloss over.
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