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Politics : Politics of Energy -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (6335)	3/19/2009 4:30:07 PM
From: RetiredNow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 86350

Tim. I'm a fiscal conservative. As such, I believe that in good times, you need to be responsible and try as best you can to run surpluses to pay down debt. In bad times, you also need to run a balanced budget. But in economic crises like the one we face now and we faced during the Great Depression, we need to run deficits. Not doing so will doom an entire generation to dramatic economic pain. The trick is twofold. First, the spending cannot be on giveaways. It needs to be on investments that have a return. Second, when the economic recovery is strong enough, a return to balanced budgets becomes the top priority. So my point is that always running a balanced budget isn't always the right thing to do. Companies borrow money all the time, even when they have large cash balances on their books, when they see a way to return more than the cost of borrowing. Having said all that, I do think we are seeing a lot of debt added to the books that is purely wasteful now with no return on investment in sight. The AIG bonuses come to mind when I say this.