I did not vote for a "Grand Bargain"

[bhikkhu]

20. I voted for good governance

which is generally what the other guys ran against and we ran for. That doesn't necessarily mean "winner takes all", or that some ideology gets followed to the letter, because the losing side picked the other ideology.

Growth at the moment is driven by a very healthy energy sector, and government borrowing and spending is at a low level now - and growing slower than the economy. I don't think its so much about the simple volume of dollars, but about how they are used. Most of the deficit worries come from simple projections forward in time, where some parameter of growth or other remains constant over time. Its usually bogus one way or another...the biggest problem we have as a country over the last twenty years is health care costs (which have gobbled up an extra 10% of GDP since 1994), but that sector is set to change.