you are on with bob bixby of the concord coalition. caller: i am tired of the democrats and republicans going overboard with our money. i am so sick of them. they can all go scratch a nickel. host: the court of public opinion when it comes to these discussions. guest: exactly. it is understandable that people would be upset about running huge deficits. the last year we had a deficit, the annual shortfall. not talking about the accumulated total debt. the annual shortfall was around $3 trillion last year. it will be about $3 trillion this year. those are huge numbers. that was unusual because of the pandemic. there was a huge amount of emergency spending needed because the economy shut down and we had the health care emergency. these last couple of years are not the years you want to focus on when thinking about the fiscal situation the government is actually in. what worries me is when the effect of the pandemic spending fade we are still at a point where we will be running trillion dollar plus deficits over the next decade and getting

you are on with bob bixby of the concord coalition.ler: i am tired of the democrats and republicans going overboard with our money. i am so sick of them. they can all go scratch a nickel. host: the court of public opinion when it comes to these discussions. guest: exactly. it is understandable that people would be upset about running huge deficits. the last year we had a deficit, the annual shortfall. not talking about the accumulated total debt. the annual shortfall was around $3 trillion last year. it will be about $3 trillion this year. those are huge numbers. that was unusual because of the pandemic. there was a huge amount of emergency spending needed because the economy shut down and we had the health care emergency. these last couple of years are not the years you want to focus on when thinking about the fiscal situation the government is actually in. what worries me is when the effect of the pandemic spending fade we are still at a point where we will be running trillion dollar plus deficits over the next decade and getting big