Is this a fiscal "don't throw me in the briar patch" moment?

A particular thought keeps recurring to me.

I am a deficit hawk and long have been. I am comfortable with emergency driven deficit spending but think that across the years the budget should broadly be in balance or slightly negative (growth and inflation enables some small degree of deficit spending.)

What I object to most strongly is the spending of money today on speculative policies, nice to have policies and consumption policies. And we do a lot of that.

Among the many dangers I see in sustained material deficit spending during good times is that it constrains necessary spending during emergencies.

My particular view is clearly not a consensus view among the chattering Mandarin Class. Both establishment parties are deeply culpable.

The only time in my adult life when we came anywhere close to a balanced budget was under Clinton. Clinton loved deal-making and the contest of politics and working with a Republican Congress, together they got to a balanced budget for a year or two. But only because of the windfall in savings from demilitarization and base closing following victory in the Cold War under Reagan.

All the other years, fiscal rectitude in Congress has been as common as moral rectitude in a Nevada cat house.

So while I endorse some of the emergency aid, all deficit, I am still anguished by the accumulating debt.

I am 95% certain this gargantuan deficit spending is pure political expediency.

But every now and then, I am reminded of leverage buy-outs in the 1980s and 1990s. The architects of those buy-outs had a relatively straight-forward strategy. Acquire well-established businesses which had become slack and undisciplined, strip their assets, load their balance sheet with debt and then let the debt payments become the taskmaster to force management to manage the business much more tightly.

Leveraged buyouts was a cruel business with a wrenching human cost. But the underlying problem was real. Many companies which were already financially dead and unlikely to be resuscitated. By loading them up with debt, the private equity firms and venture capitalists created a model that forced dramatic improvements in productivity and financial performance.

There were many buy-outs which went belly-up. But there were plenty for whom the shock therapy dramatically improved management and productivity.

The thought which keeps flitting across my mind is whether Trump is playing a deep game.

Trump is no deficit hawk. He had a few head nods in that direction during the 2016 campaign but it was clear that deficit reduction was not a priority. Nor has it been evidenced in his subsequent budgets.

Democrats were eager for deficit spending during this partially self-created emergency. I don't think Trump was especially motivated to demur.

At this point, we are on track for the deficit to expand an additional $4 trillion.

But is there a deeper game afoot? Doesn't this look like a leveraged buy-out where the burden of debt is so great that it forces decisions and actions which were necessary but postponed? Is it not the case that most Democratic items are already big ticket? There really wasn't room for them in the budget before the Covid-19 emergency. There really won't be room afterwards.

I think the probability that this is a deliberate strategy is slight. But its an intriguing idea none-the-less.