Our Threatened Freedom

What is Wrong with Deficit Spending

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Political Studies

Lesson: 152-169

Genre: Conversation

Track: 152

Dictation Name: Vol. L - Part 09 - What is Wrong with Deficit Spending

Location/Venue: Unknown

Year: 1980’s – 1990’s

[Dr. Rushdoony] What is wrong with deficit spending? This is R.J. Rushdoony with a report on our threatened freedom.

Under consideration today is another constitutional amendment, one banning deficit spending. The amendment would require that federal spending equal revenues and the federal expenditures cannot grow at a rate greater than the gross national product. The proposed amendment has been attacked by one of America’s major newspapers as trivializing the constitution. The purpose of the proposed amendment is to extend the Bill of Rights to cover our economic rights, to prevent the federal government from passing confiscatory taxes.

There is also the matter of common sense. How long can you and I, as individuals, survive economically if we run up a huge deficit every year? The federal government is well beyond a trillion dollars in debt, and close to bankruptcy, Social Security is in serious trouble, and so are other programs. At the same time, Congress has passed the highest budgets in history and we are seeing also our largest deficits.

Common sense should tell us that sooner or later a day of reckoning comes for all reckless debtors, whether they be persons or nations.

There is however, another aspect to this issue, a moral one. Debt living, whether in persons or nations, is a product of bad morality, and it creates an even lower moral level as a consequence. Historically, times of inflation have also been eras of lower moral expectations, high crime, family conflicts, and social disintegration. What we buy when we incur debt is a growing decay in the quality of life.

Deficit spending is thus economically wrong, and also morally wrong. It is also a serious political error, in that it creates economic inflation, and with it social unrest, which leads to a distrust of the political process. Remember, it was massive inflation and political disillusionment which preceded the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and the rise of Adolph Hitler. Any nation which indulges in sustained deficit spending, first bankrupts and destroys its most stable citizens, and then it destroys itself.

An amendment thus to forbid deficit spending by the federal government is a necessary step and one towards the survival of our form of government and of freedom.

This has been R.J. Rushdoony with a report on our threatened freedom.