What about deficits?

Disagreement about deficits is a common theme nowadays.
Even among Republicans, there is no unity on this issue.
Defending his recent proposal to freeze government spending, Representative John A. Boehner, the House minority leader, said that we simply cannot afford to mortgage our children and grandchildren’s future to pay for this big government spending spree. I told you before I disagree with this opinion because I think we must invest huge amounts of money in order to solve the financial problems.

Martin Feldstein , the Harvard economist and adviser to the past three Republican presidents, shores my idea.
He is certain that short-run deficits help end recessions.
When a downturn throws people out of work, they spend less, causing still others to be thrown out of work, and so on, in a downward spiral.
Failure to use short-run deficits to stimulate spending amplifies that spiral, causing further declines in tax receipts and even bigger deficits.

In 1929, President Herbert Hoover thought that the best response to a collapsing economy was to balance the federal budget. With incomes and tax receipts falling sharply, that meant cutting federal spending. Today we all know President Hoover was mistaken.

But what about long-run deficits?
To think more clearly about them, we must recognize that carrying debt is costly.
Because the government needs to pay interest on its debt each year.
John A. Boehner said we even mortgage our children’s future with it but that is not true according to me.
I understand it can be difficult to understand for someone without an economic background. Martin Feldstein has an example to make things less complicated. It is just like a homeowner’s monthly payment. The payment is larger with a 10-year mortgage than with a 30-year one. But the total burden of the various repayment options (in technical terms, their “present value”) is exactly the same. It’s a simple trade-off between intensity of burden and duration of burden.

So only one question remains, how are we going to pay for these interests on the long term?
One part can be reimbursed thanks to the economic growth in the near future I guess, but we need some good measures as well.
I suspect that the Harvard economist reads my blog because he has given the same example I did three weeks ago. Namely a tax on gasoline.
A $2 tax on each gallon for example, would generate more than $100 billion in additional revenue a year.
He says that there are many ways to pay down debt without requiring painful sacrifices but I wonder in wich intensity politicians will be able to collaborate in order to pass their new provisions.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/22/business/economy/22econ.html?_r=1&ref=economy