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Maybe I’ve had this all wrong.

I grew up with the federal deficit and I still have the fiscal scars to prove it. Twenty-seven straight years the federal government ran deficits, 21of them in excess of three per cent of GDP. At its peak, in fiscal 1985, it hit a nightmarish 8.3 per cent.

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Taxes were raised, spending was cut, but too late: the fiscal momentum from running such large deficits for so long was unstoppable. From less than 20 per cent of GDP in 1976, the federal debt grew to 68 per cent two decades later. Just to pay interest on that mountain of debt eventually consumed as much as 38 cents of every tax dollar: almost as much as the federal government spent directly on all other programs combined. It is hard now to recall how crazy that period was: like those scenes of people carting around wheelbarrows of money in old German newsreels.

Maybe we shouldn’t try. Like elderly Germans still living in terror of hyperinflation decades afterward, maybe I and others of my generation are living in the past, caught in the grip of an irrational deficit-phobia born of our youth. Maybe, as some economists gently suggest, we need to let it go. We are not still living in the 1990s, after all. The federal deficit today, at $19 billion, is less than one per cent of GDP; the debt, just 31 per cent. Interest costs are an incredible seven per cent of revenues, the lowest in at least a century, maybe ever.