GDR writes:
It seems to me that my approach is about as simplistic as it gets. Deficits just mean accumulating and accelerating debt. High levels of debt that you don't have the income or the reserves to cover just ain't good.
GDR, you didn't actually answer him at all.
It helps to view deficits as borrowing money from the future by spending more money than what you actually have. Ordinary people do this by using their credit cards. The difference between the government doing this and ordinary people doing this is ordinary people have to pay back their debt while the government could continue to do this without anyone actually calling in the debts. After all, your grandson can't just pick up the phone and call 70 years into the past and say "gee, grandpa, could you please start paying back the money you borrowed?"
Yes, everyone seems to agree that deficits are bad, but noone actually knows why it is bad.
In the past, other governments have tried to spend more money than they had by printing out more money. This created inflation and eventually ran their economies down the drain. However, so far there hasn't really been any disasterous side affect that anyone could see from borrowing money from the future. I guess as long as the debt collectors from the future don't show up at our doorsteps, we'll continue to spend money that we don't actually have.