Right, using arithmetic to set a budget is bad methodology. Might want to rethink your statement.

Where exactly did I say you should run a deficit? The words that I said were “wide ranging governmental policy.” I was thinking of examples like the minimum wage, where people often try to use econ 101 reasoning to definitively prove that raising the minimum wage must produce significant unemployment, when the real world literature turns out extremely muddy and contentious, ie the effect is much less than expected for a variety of complicated reasons that a supply and demand curve do not capture.