A letter writer Thursday echos the late George Wallace in blaming the federal government’s budget imbalance on Ivy League-educated U.S. presidents who appointed “blue-blooded elitists” to run the national economy.

The writer boasts that he learned in the eighth grade that “if you spend more than you take in, the result is a deficit.” And, he suggests, “These intellectuals must have skipped the eighth grade” because “we now have a $19 trillion deficit.”

The Congressional Budget Office puts the current deficit at $544 billion. That’s a long way from $19 trillion, which the CBO says is the size of the national debt. Dismaying numbers in either case.

By the eighth grade, most of us had learned the difference between debt and deficit. I’m just sayin’.

David George
Gainesville

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