In most budgetary discussions, it is erroneously assumed that the national government has a financial constraint and has to budget like a household.
The analogy most of us draw between household budgets and government budgets is false. Households use the currency and must finance their spending.
However, government issues the currency and must first spend (i.e. credit private bank accounts) before it can tax (i.e. debit bank accounts). The claim that governments must tax or borrow to ‘finance’ its spending is false under a fiat-currency system.
And a growing economy cannot be an end in itself – it’s the means to improving people’s lives and take into account a responsible global citizenship while doing it.
Thinking is just one way for an individual to organize his or her impressions. For good and for worse, an economic theory, or an ideology, or -ism, does that for you. But this will not replace the nagging sense that something very important is missing in our current budget thinking.