When deficit spending is appropriate

If you're familiar with my campaign at all, you know that I hate deficit spending, and you know why. I suspect most of you agree with me. But one question I've been asked is, what about the Great Depression? Some theories say that the Depression was exacerbated by the government's attempt to balance the budget by cutting spending and raising taxes. People ask, am I really advocating similar policies?

I'm not. I'm not saying that the government should never run a deficit. During a major war, or during a serious economic crisis, deficit spending is the lesser evil. The problem is not that the government has been running deficits the last couple years; we've been fighting two wars and hit a serious economic crisis, and deficit spending is not an unreasonable short-term response to those conditions. The problem is that we've already been running deficits constantly for decades!

Now, we can argue about whether we should have been fighting two wars, or whether the recession could have been avoided entirely. But that's a different topic. My point is that the time came that we needed to go into debt to deal with these problems, but thanks to Congress's irresponsibility, we'd already maxed out our credit cards!

Deficit spending is not evil. Deficit spending is a tool. That tool has been abused, and that abuse is the cause of the significant inflation we're going to see over the next few years. The recession is over, at least for now. We're withdrawing from Iraq. We've been in Afghanistan for nearly eight years; that's not a short-term issue any more. Congress is out of excuses. Don't vote for anyone who won't work to eliminate the deficit.