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Notes -
This is true.
This is ... I guess true, under the unlikely premise of a majority of politicians actually caring to cut the budget?
Acquiring lots of debt is super fun at the time, forgoing debt or even acquiring debt more slowly is so much less fun that stupid people call it "austerity", and actually paying back debt is almost a ludicrous idea now. We haven't repaid more than a couple percent of the federal debt in a year since the 1920s, and that was when the debt was like 3% of GDP, not 130%. If most voters were smart enough to grasp accounting identities then they'd consider the fact that debt spending in one year means debt repayment (or at least less opportunity for debt spending) in a later year, and they'd control for that when judging economic outcomes ... but they aren't, so they don't, and thus politicians have to choose between making themselves popular by making life harder for their successors or vice-versa.
Nobody wants to pick vice-versa.
Sigh. Such a terrible system. But I guess this is just the world we're in.
How would a society where this system actually worked even look?
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