We're obsessed with a deficit only when either the Democrats are in control. I mean, if nobody talks about the deficit when Republicans are in control, you know they pass these huge tax breaks. They, you know, enact gigantic military expenditures.

Nobody even mentions the deficit. But when Democrats get in control, suddenly it's all about the deficit and it goes back to Ronald Reagan. I mean, Ronald Reagan and his budget director, David Stockman, they really did come up with a a a kind of plan to, as they put it, starve the beast at the Beast.

Obviously, in their view, was the federal government, and the way they starve the federal government is that they just spend like mad on the military especially, and they provide tax breaks. At the same time, they rack up a huge debt, a huge deficit.

And George H.W. Bush adds to it so that by the time you get the first Democrat who is President Bill Clinton and by the way, I was there, I know this, I lived through it. Then there's nothing that Clinton can do except cut the deficit.

That is the measure of his success. Well, let me take you back to 1992, 1993, Bill Clinton had ran on a platform of putting people first, investing in education and job training and infrastructure and basic research and development.

All of the investments that the country needed in order to improve productivity and give everybody a fair chance to get ahead. What happens? The first thing, and I was the head of the economic transition team for Bill Clinton, the first thing we run into is this question about, well, how are you going to possibly deal with the deficit, a huge deficit?

This is not only coming from Republicans, it's also coming from Alan Greenspan at the Fed. It's also coming from Wall Street. Everybody, now that a Democrat is in the White House, everybody worries that there's going to be too much spending, and we've got to get the deficit under control.

Well, it meant that the first year, certainly in the first eight months of the Clinton administration, all we did was try to cut the deficit and satisfy the bond traders on Wall Street. We can see the same deficit obsession living on now that Joe Biden is in charge, Democrats are in charge of the House and the Senate and have the White House. Well, it rears its ugly head again in terms of build back better.

I mean, the irony here is that you've got a piece of legislation that is enormously popular and necessary, needed by the middle class and working class and the poor.

And it is paid for. There are taxes that will increase, particularly on corporations and the wealthy to pay for it. And yet people are still screaming that it's going to cause huge problems for the deficit. They're not saying this about the military budget, which keeps expanding.

They're not saying this about tax cuts. I mean that 1.9 trillion dollar tax cut that was passed by the Republicans under Donald Trump's administration. Well, nobody talked about the deficit then, but suddenly this $1.75000000000000 over ten years. I mean, that's paid for.

This is this has become an object of concern for the deficit. That's absurd. And yet if you say it over and over and over again, people begin to worry about it. But also, it begins to provide those who want to vote against it because corporate America doesn't want it, because the rich don't want their taxes to go up. They get a kind of a protective shield they can always say, like Joe Manchin has already been saying, Oh, well, I'm not sure I'm going to vote for the Build Back Better because it may have deficit implications.

Well, that's obviously bullshit. There. The deficit really doesn't matter, a deficit is an accounting feature. I mean, it gets year by year. It just measures how much it's going to wait for. A plane goes over. The deficit doesn't matter the deficit it is.

It is an accounting kind of technique. And what goes into the deficit? What it's not included in the deficit is all pretty much arbitrary. Now, the debt that is the accumulated deficit over a number of years is relevant only in terms of its relationship to the overall size of the economy if the accumulated deficit.

Well, the deficit is just an accounting convention, what's put into the deficit in terms of what's counted and what's not counted are completely arbitrary. Now the accumulated deficit over years, that's the national debt and the national debt is not irrelevant.

But if the economy is growing faster than the debt is growing, we don't have a problem. And even if the debt is growing faster than the economy, if much of that debt is about investment in future productivity, that means the economy in the future is going to be growing faster than the debt.

So it's all a matter of how the issue is understood and framed. We've spent $1,000,000,000,000 on post-9-11 wars that were completely unfinanced. I mean, it was based on borrowing. We didn't. We didn't raise taxes for them, but nobody complained about that.

I mean, over the next ten years, the military budget is on track to be another four. Is it 8 trillion or 4 trillion over the next ten? I think it's. I think it's age related from the next step. Yeah. Over the next ten years, the military budget.

Yeah. Over the next ten years, the military budget of the United States is on track to be $10 trillion. But is anybody talking about that in terms of inflation or a deficit or any other economic problem? No, because everybody assumes, well, we somehow have got to have a strong military and if the military budget keeps on going up.

So what? If you look at the military budget and extrapolate from what it is today, over the next ten years, it's $8 trillion and that's not paid for. It's not as if their taxes that are being set aside for that $8 trillion.

I mean that $8 trillion has got to come out of somebody's pockets. OK, I'm going to move myself. I mean, we can we give out billions of dollars every year in tax breaks to big industries, big companies? Okay, I'm going to move myself.

We give billions of dollars of corporate subsidies, tax subsidies away every year to what Big Pharma a billions of dollars in terms of special tax breaks to the biggest banks too big to fail. I mean, they get a huge subsidy in effect from the federal government.

Also, we are giving subsidies away to oil and gas. I mean, are the one of the biggest recipients of federal largesse, corporate welfare. I mean, nobody talks about it. Nobody talks about, well, we're spending a lot of money on these corporations.

It's just like, we don't talk about how much we're spending on the military and the military industrial complex. It's just like we don't talk about all of the benefits going in the form of tax cuts to the wealthy and big corporations.

Instead, all we do is focus on these episodic, specific, rather small compared to everything else programs designed for the middle class, working class and the poor to help people. Yeah. What this all means is that instead of focusing on the deficit.

Yeah. OK. So please don't believe Republicans or the corporate media or, you know, conservative economists when they go off on the deficit, always put it in context. Always ask yourself, well, compared to what? And why don't they complain about the deficit when it comes to the military or corporate welfare or big tax breaks for the wealthy?

And why is it that it's only when Democrats are proposing things for average working people and the poor and middle class that we hear about the deficit?