Deficits: Which, How Much, and So What?
批评政客和许多经济学家对赤字缺乏真正理解，强调赤字有不同衡量方式，其大小和影响取决于如何测量，并指出当前实际赤字过小。
Politicians almost all talk about the deficit, and almost all decry it. Very few, literally, know what they are talking about. To my dismay I have felt over some years that too many economists fall in the same category. I shall insist, contrary to Ricardian views, that deficits do matter and can matter very much. They can be too small as well as too large, and you cannot even begin to tell what they are until you measure them right. At this time, the real is too small. One can pick from a huge variety of deficits. The federal for the 1991 fiscal year reported by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), including off-budget and on-budget items, was $269 billion. This compares with an economically more meaningful federal on national income accounts of $190.3 billion, which was just 3.3 percent of gross domestic product. If you were to follow Congressional legislation and arbitrarily exclude social security (and the postal service) from the unified or total OMB budget you can work the up to $321 billion. More sensibly, one can exclude $67 billion for that is, the savingsand-loan bailout, which is at this point merely a financial transaction substituting explicit federal debt for the debt implicit in deposit guarantees. This would get the down to $202 billion. If one looks at a (measured at 5.5 percent unemployment, which I would consider too high), eliminating the effects of the recession along with deposit insurance, the would be $124 billion. Looking at what is called the primary, standardized-employment budget, excluding interest payments along with deposit insurance, one actually finds a substantial surplus, of $71 billion.' There are other, more meaningful measures of the that might well be advanced. These would entail: 1) adjustment for the inflation tax on the holders of existing debt; 2) including the offset of state and local government surpluses, particularly since federal grants contributing to those now meager surpluses comprise a major element in the federal deficit; and 3) excluding net capital expenditures, as would be consistent with private business accounting. These most appropriate adjustments, as shown in Table 1A, bring the deficit down from its 1991 figure of $269 billion to a paltry $17 billion. Still another way of looking at the budget is to note that an appropriate concept of balance for the government in a growing economy, like that for any business, is that the debt grow no faster than income or output, so that the debt:income ratio does not rise, as shown in Table 1B. The 7-percent growth that the economy has experienced in previous, nonrecession years would then imply an increase in debt-or deficit, aside from the effects of the recession-of $188 billion. This in a meaningful sense would be balance; but that is again 3.3 percent of GDP, almost precisely the actual federal on the national income account. Furthermore, that includes a substantial component due to the recession. By standards of constant debt: GDP ratio, a high-employment, cyclically adjusted budget would be in substantial surplus. The one sophisticated objection frequently offered to budget deficits without, I must say, paying much attention to how