Rhetoric About Budget Deficit
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Our country is inflicted with a pandemic.
It has affected every writer and columnist for all the newspapers and magazines which I read, including yours, business and news weeklies, market letters, and the commentators and news show participants on the electronic media, as well as Presidents Bush and Clinton, and technicians who know better, like Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan.
Everyone of the above speaks or writes of “reducing the budget deficit.” That is sheer nonsense. What is universally meant is reducing the annual increase in the budget in the budget deficit.
It might be helpful to those voters who do not appreciate the difference to realize that by the time, if ever, that the annual deficit increase becomes zero, the nation will still be faced with a debt of at least $5 trillion, not to mention vast contingent liabilities such as those of HUD, the guarantees of securities like those issued by FDIC, Fannie Mae, Sallie Mae and myriad others, plus repayment of borrowings from Social Security payments.
Confronting us, also, will be the bonded indebtedness of states and municipalities, as well as guarantees by, and disguised deficits of, such entities.
If the above facts were emphasized, it might encourage more sympathy for solutions to the perhaps insoluble situation in which we find ourselves.
EDWARD LASKER
Los Angeles
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