C'mon guys - you two are much too smart for that and I mean that.

To pretend it isn't a business is ludicrous. Please explain how it is not a business and show your work.

Revenues and expenditures. Money in, money out. Providing a consumable service while paying salaries to employees. It is the very definition of a business.

The only major difference between a government and a business, is that you are forced through taxation to buy services from the government (captured market) and money can be printed to cover immediate losses (devaluation of the dollar). In the open market, nobody forces anyone to buy from any certain business and money has to be made rather than printed. That's it. Other than that, they financially operate in exactly the same way. Money in and money out.

Not treating it like a business is EXACTLY how we find ourselves $20T in debt with another $80 - 100T in liabilities. As Thatcher put it, what happens when you run out of other people's money? Either as a business or a government, you go broke when that happens. See Venezuela right now and Yugoslavia before it. Ironically, Venezuela could immediately right their ship and become the largest economy in SA if they properly utilized the very one product of value they have that matters. Their natural resources and reserves. Their political system is preventing that, not the math of running a business.

I deal with stats all day long and I can make the numbers say whatever my Leadership wants them to say. Math is math. It's settled science. Either you are going broke, staying static or you are increasing your bottom line. Math has nothing to do with politics. It's the policies behind the math that people fight over, but the math itself doesn't change.

It's ok to not agree with me. You'd just be wrong is all.