Is there a reason the federal government wouldn’t want to start paying down the deficit? What are the negatives to having more money coming in than going out?
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I think you are confusing deficit and debt.
Deficit is the the money going out being greater than the money coming in (frequently over a whole year when talking about the government). It is a budget term. You don’t “pay down” the deficit. You spend less or bring more money in. You can reduce or (as the government prefers) increase the deficit.
The debt is the the accumulation of deficit over time. This is how much you actually owe.
If you are growing then a moderate debt isn’t the end of the world. But it you spend recklessly (like our politicians on both sides of the aisle–one gladly spends your money, and the other says they won’t but do anyways) then things will become untenable. One metric to determine when this becomes untenable is to look at the ratio of debt to GDP. You have to be careful here, because the government loves to redefine terms to hide stuff they don’t want you to see (like the unemployment rate and inflation indexes that are reported all over the place). To a normal person, cutting funding to something means you reduce the amount you are spending on it. To the government cutting funding actually means reducing the rate of increase in funding.
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