Wealth & Money Quote by William Vickrey

Vickrey’s line lands like a deliberately unpious warning: treating the balanced budget as a “holy grail” isn’t prudence, it’s zealotry. The phrase “insane pursuit” does double work. It indicts the politics of fiscal restraint as irrational, and it hints at a kind of mass hallucination: a public narrative so tidy and morally satisfying that it overrides basic economic mechanics.

The subtext is that budgets aren’t household checkbooks, and recessions aren’t cured by virtuous belt-tightening. In Vickrey’s Keynesian frame, government deficits are often the stabilizer when private demand collapses; insisting on balance at the wrong moment yanks spending out of the system precisely when it’s most needed. The sting is in “in the end,” a reminder that austerity sells as responsibility in the short term, then bills the future with unemployment and shuttered investment.

Context matters: Vickrey was an economist best known for rigorous work on public finance and incentives (and, late in life, a Nobel). He watched American politics repeatedly elevate deficit reduction into a moral crusade, especially as inflation fears and anti-government rhetoric made “fiscal discipline” a litmus test. His provocation is aimed less at arithmetic than at the cultural theatre around it: balancing the budget becomes a symbolic cleansing ritual, proof of seriousness, even if it sacrifices the real economy to maintain the appearance of virtue.

The rhetoric works because it reframes “responsibility” as potentially reckless, exposing how economic slogans can become policy traps.