A balanced budget (particularly that of a government) is a budget with revenues equal to expenditures, and neither a budget deficit nor a budget surplus ("the accounts balance"). More generally, it refers to a budget with no deficit, but possibly with a surplus. A cyclically balanced budget is a budget that is not necessarily balanced year-to-year, but is balanced over the economic cycle, running a surplus in boom years and running a deficit in lean years, with these offsetting over time.
Balanced budgets, and the associated topic of budget deficits, are a contentious point within academic economics and within politics. The mainstream economic view is that having a balanced budget in every year is not desirable, with budget deficits in lean times being desirable. Most economists have also agreed that a balanced budget would decrease interest rates, increase savings and investment, shrink trade deficits and help the economy grow faster over a longer period of time.
Read more about Balanced Budget: Economic Views, Balanced Budget Multiplier
Famous quotes containing the words balanced and/or budget:
“Perhaps if the future existed, concretely and individually, as something that could be discerned by a better brain, the past would not be so seductive: its demands would be balanced by those of the future. Persons might then straddle the middle stretch of the seesaw when considering this or that object. It might be fun.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“We might come closer to balancing the Budget if all of us lived closer to the Commandments and the Golden Rule.”
—Ronald Reagan (b. 1911)