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Table of Contents
Then god seperated the state from the church
Secularization
Issues of their times
Jehovah's Witlesses
Christianity
Science
Woman
Overton Window
Malcolm X
We're not burning witches anymore, so we are secular
Misogyny
Incest
Ableism
Pedophilia
Arrogance
Man or Bear?
If Buying isn't Owning, then Pirating isn't Stealing
Slashed Zero
Self-Censoring
Words/Economy/
Deficit
Deficit is a term used to describe a numerically negative disparity between two things.
Deficit typically comes out of the field of economy and is one of the last things you would find me write about. After all, economy is politics, and I am not a political commentator. I am an amateur philosophical commentator trying to cover philosophy-related things. Usually, it is very easy for me to stay out of political topics, because - especially with economics-related topics - I have basically nothing to add, anyway. However, in this case I have found myself actually having something to add.
It is about a social media post Donald Trump made the other day:
Trump: Deficit = Loss, the USA is losing 1.5Tr USD annually
To be very clear, to me this isn't about Trump. I don't care about Trump. He was democratically elected and delivers the kind of politics all of us roughly expected him to deliver, regardless of what that means to either you, me, or the other side of the political spectrum. No, this one is different because I have general knowledge of what he is talking about, and in addition I also have words this time that I think would constitute a nice and clean response to that social media post.
Spending Deficit
That answer, specifically, is: Being out of money and being bankrupt are not the same. Similarly, deficit and loss are not the same. All of us should know that many people store some or much of their value in assets. For these people, running out of cash on hand doesn't mean a lot and certainly doesn't mean that they're bankrupt now. If you are capable of making this distinction, then you are capable of distinguishing between loss and deficit, too.
So, typically the term deficit is used in economy to describe government spending. When a government spends more money than it makes through, for example, taxes, it is running at a deficit. Spending more than you have accumulates to debt. Accumulating debt and operating at a loss are not the same. Because even if your government has a spending deficit, they are still getting things for their spending. For example, the United States routinely imports semiconductors and microchips, the spending for which is added to the national debt. But, critically, the United States is actually getting those semiconductors and microchips, so the money wasn't just lost. This spending adds to the spending deficit, but it is not the same as just losing money.
This is the reason why deficit is called deficit, because the calculation of deficit is a calculation of subtraction. Not all subtraction calculations equal loss. Real losses happen in investments (which are not the same as spending), when the revenue does not match or exceed the original investment. Movies can run at a loss. Companies might sell products at a loss, the United States might export goods at a loss if it sells at a price lower than what it cost the United States to produce the goods. There might be a discussion about whether some government spending could be considered a loss if it doesn't align with one's personal values on what the government should or should not spend money on in the first place. But that's not the kind of conversation that I want to have, and it's not the conversation Trump is having, because he talks about the trade deficit.