It is true that a government’s
budget can be read as a blueprint of priorities in terms of what is valued, and
what is not so highly valued. The blueprint itself, as a whole, also evinces a
priority in terms of values. As the big-ticket items, such as large spending
categories and massive tax-cuts, get the most attention, whether a budget is in
balance can go by the wayside, and what that says about the electorate (and
thus the state of democracy) can easily be missed. Ultimately, public policy
and even the votes of the elected representatives point back to the popular
sovereign, the People—more specifically, the electorate, and its values. By 2024,
the deficit and accumulated debt of the U.S. Government had reached such
gigantic numbers that something could be said to be amiss concerning those
values. The underlying culprit, which can be said to be an illness that is
human, all too human, had by then infected American democracy beyond the wherewithal
of virtually any elected federal representative to enunciate well enough that
the electorate could look clearly at itself, and thus size itself up beyond the
partial diagnoses that can be found in partisan attacks.
The full essay is at "U.S. Government Deficits and Debt."
