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No one is saying it is impossible to balance the budget; we are saying it is impossible congress will actually act before it gets so bad that we implode.
That is exactly it!
The political system is simply a popularity contest. No politician, and I mean NO politician, is going to commit career suicide and make the necessary cuts. Their choices are limited. Cut spending, raise taxes, inflate. There is zero chance of cutting spending and the other two result in catastrophe.
Cutting is not gonna help the economy, but budget tweaking might be.
In fact, you both are in much different positions, you are financially constrained in your spending and debt. Government is not. That's because government issues dollars, and you don't.
They may not be "constrained" in the same sense, but the government debasement of the currency can't go on forever. What do you see as the potential outcomes of continuing to run up the debt?
The gov. takes money from people, flushes some down the toilet and gives the rest back in other forms. They also print their own money, which they do use for some necessary functions of government, but the inflation effectively robs us of our own production as well. With increasing debt, which could be defined as increasing wastefulness, how can it not end badly? The only way I can see it not ending badly is if our productive capacity increased substantially (which might be possible with tech.), but if that happened I think they'd just waste more and more by continuing to spend. Bad habits need to change, but the political system doesn't allow for that. Even Bitcoin isn't gonna prevent major pain, but it could force a change in those nasty spending habits.
You're mixing things. The government borrows because there's a deficit caused by cyclical or structural sectoral disbalances. It doesn't have anything to do with private sector's spending habits, which are more of a mentality thing.
And how does gov't flush some money down the toilet? What do you mean by this?
