Politics & Power Quote by Sam Ewing

Ewing’s line lands because it pretends to be a neutral definition while quietly swapping in a moral diagnosis. A deficit, in civics textbooks, is arithmetic: outlays minus revenues. Ewing keeps the math but poisons the innocence of the terms. Spending is framed as almost automatic, even appetitive; collecting is where “nerve” is required. That single word turns taxation from policy into courage, and it implies the real constraint on government isn’t ideology or economics but political cowardice.

The subtext is a cynical view of democratic incentives: voters like services, hate taxes, and punish whoever makes the bill visible. So governments learn to give with one hand and borrow with the other, laundering the true cost into “the future,” where today’s officeholders won’t face the consequences. By calling revenue collection a test of nerve, Ewing also suggests a kind of performative dishonesty: leaders sell the benefits as immediate and the costs as optional, then act surprised when the numbers don’t add up.

Context matters. Ewing wrote in a century when mass government expanded through wars, the New Deal/Great Society era, and the modern expectation that the state will cushion downturns. Deficits became less an emergency and more a recurring political tool, especially once politicians discovered they could run against “tax-and-spend” while still spending. The line’s bite comes from its refusal to treat deficits as a technocratic puzzle; it drags them back into the arena of accountability, where budgets are less about balance sheets than about what leaders are willing to admit, out loud, that government actually costs.