"Think how many times you have heard conservative politicians say that since businesses and households have to balance their budgets, government should do the same. But individuals and businesses separate out their current expenses from their capital outlays; people don’t define themselves as running a deficit this year because they bought a new house for $200,000. No, they finance capital expenditures like houses, new kitchens, and automobiles by borrowing, and they count themselves as living within their means as long as they have income to cover all their expenses including interest payments." - Fred Block (UC Davis sociologist) in Dissent
As Block puts it: "one essential issue has yet to be engaged or discussed: changing budget procedures to facilitate a long-term increase in government investment spending." 'Balanced budgets' are the reason "why we have a $2.2 trillion backlog of needed repairs to our decaying infrastructure...why our vital research and development machinery is generating fierce battles between different interest groups fighting for a piece of a shrinking pie....why our education system... is increasingly threadbare, dysfunctional, and ineffective in facilitating upward mobility." Glaringly omitted here is "this is (one reason) why we have decaying public health insurance programs (medicaid, medicare) and the worst health insurance system among all Western capitlaist nations because public money is not spent guaranteeing universal access".
Block proposes creating two different Federal budgets: a 'current account' and a 'capital account', where the 'current' acct would be kept in balance (except during reccession) and the 'capital' acct would be financed by borrowing. I'm not sure whether this is a good idea or not, but such a plan's raison d'etre (facilitaing large spending initiatives) is far more attractive than that of deficit-hawking (i.e. strangling the ability of the government to spend).
Concretely, Block proposes the following:
"First, the Obama Administration needs to begin right away developing plans for big ticket infrastructure projects to assure that they will be “shovel ready” over the next three to five years. Now is the time to map out, prioritize, and secure public support for multi-year projects of building high-speed rail lines, modernizing mass transit systems, and facilitating the replacement of coal and oil with green energy. Second, there needs to be an “all hands on deck” offensive to persuade the public of the urgency of this budgetary reform."
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