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Good Deficits: Protecting The Public Interest From Deficit Hysteria, Neil H. Buchanan
Good Deficits: Protecting The Public Interest From Deficit Hysteria, Neil H. Buchanan
UF Law Faculty Publications
President Obama has come under increasingly fierce criticism for the size of the federal budget deficit, as both Democratic and Republican politicians loudly proclaim that federal spending should be cut. This article explains why such anti-deficit fervor is misguided and simplistic, and why, perhaps counter-intuitively, cutting government spending can hurt the country, rather than help it, in both the short run and the long run. In the short run, cutting deficit spending can be disastrous to the economy, especially if the economy is already in decline. In addition, because the federal budget fails to separate spending that provides long-term benefits …
Is It Sometimes Good To Run Budget Deficits? If So, Should We Admit It (Out Loud)?, Neil H. Buchanan
Is It Sometimes Good To Run Budget Deficits? If So, Should We Admit It (Out Loud)?, Neil H. Buchanan
UF Law Faculty Publications
There are bad deficits and there are good deficits. What makes a fiscal deficit good or bad depends on both the context in which the deficit is run and the reason that the deficit is rising. The belief that it is unquestionably foolish to adopt policies that directly or indirectly increase the government's annual borrowing on the financial markets - which is what it means to run a budget deficit - is not the universal truth that the current conventional wisdom might imply. Budget deficits are potentially dangerous and must be monitored carefully, but they are not always, inevitably, completely, …