Add 'Em Up

   It's not hard to figure, folks. When you reduce revenue and increase spending, you go broke.
   Whether that matters on a national level is something that economists have been debating for years. As former Vice President Dick Cheney once said, "Deficits don't matter."
   But do they?
   It may be true that government bonds are one of the safest of all investments, and most are held by citizens of the country that issues the bonds, so in a sense you owe the money to yourself.
   It's also true that when a government is really up against a financial wall, it can simply print more money, and hope that things settle down relatively soon. But putting more money into circulation -- inflating the supply of money -- only means more cost to the consumer, since prices rise to absorb the amount of money available.
   Fortunately, major nations have a central bank to help control the supply of money and thus keep inflation in check. That's one of the major goals of the U.S. Federal Reserve. The Fed does not, however, have direct influence on the U.S. Treasury, which controls the printing presses for cash money.
   And for all the talk from conservatives about the horrors of deficit spending and the desperate need for budget control and debt reduction, the historic reality is that there have been more years of national budget deficits under Republican administrations than under Democratic presidents.
   For example, President Bill Clinton inherited a budget in the hole by some $255 billion, but turned things around so the government operated with a surplus of income over expenses for four years. When he left office, his successor George W. Bush inherited a budget surplus of $128 billion. Within a year, however, that surplus was gone and government budgets have posted deficits ever since.
   Now the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reports that the federal deficit -- the difference between income and expenses -- is likely to soar to more than $1 trillion in two years. That's  a thousand times bigger than the $1.5 billion deficit posted in 2010. Since then, the federal deficit retreated, so the anticipated deficit for the current fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30, will be about $984 billion, according to the U.S. Treasury. This as the Trump administration implements huge tax cuts, especially for corporations, and greater spending for the military as social welfare budgets are slashed.
   Like the man said, when you reduce income and increase spending, you go broke.
   So is the U.S. government likely to go broke? That's something for academics to argue, but as the national debt rises to match the level of economic output, there's likely to be a problem, especially if the economy lapses into a recession, where the total value of goods and services produced in a given year declines.