The Week: Paul Brandus: The Deficit is Shrinking, But it's Still a Huge Problem

Source:The New Democrat. 

Ideally what you want to do with your debt and deficit outlook, is to run deficits and even big deficits when the economy is bad. And when the economy is good and in today’s case is growing well with good job growth, is to run surplus’, or at least start paying down your debt and deficits. The United States has been in deficits since 2002. So obviously we’ve run up debt ever since and the only way to start paying that down is with a balanced budget. You don’t have to have a balanced budget to have a strong economy. But your debt even if it is growing has to be manageable and not growing faster than your economy. To use as an example.

Assuming America doesn’t balanced its budget in the next 5-10 years, which I believe is likely, what we need to do is to have an economy that is as strong as possible which means growing well and producing a lot of good jobs. And during this period the country needs to be doing things that doesn’t make our short and long-term fiscal outlooks look even worst. What is called in Washington PAYGO, which means paying for things that you do as you do them. Whether it is government investments or tax cuts, you don’t borrow the money. You pay for them up front.

So if the Federal Government is doing things to create even stronger economic growth, which I believe it has to do to help avoid future fiscal crisis’, you pay for them. We need to as a country need to rebuild our country through infrastructure investment. We need to get off of foreign oil at least and long-term perhaps fossil fuels all together. To do that we need to produce our own natural resources. Natural gas, solar, wind to use as examples. And to do these things we need a national energy policy that invest in and encourages these American natural resources.

We need to reform our immigration system and we need to reform our tax code. Our poverty rate is way to high for our economy to as strong as it needs to be and to compete with the rest of the developed world. So we need to move Americans out of poverty and into economic dependence. And all of these new things are going to require additional financial resources, but we need to do them and pay for them.

The stronger your economy is, the better off you’ll be to balance your budget and start paying down your debt. Which is why economic and job growth and paying for the things that drives that should be our number one economic and fiscal priorities right now.