Now, I’m no fancy economist, but when the road eats my axle, I start doubting all this “fiscal responsibility” talk. Deficits aren’t dangerous when spent wisely. Government spending on housing, healthcare, education, and energy lowers daily costs and grows individual wealth. Bad roads, high rents, and medical bills bleed families dry. But smart investment flips the script, building capacity, cutting bills, and leaving people richer, not poorer. It’s not about spending less, but spending better. That’s the real wealth strategy. 

In This Article

• Why waste, not debt, is the real danger
• How roads and infrastructure cut your costs
• Why housing investment builds wealth
• How healthcare and education save money long-term
• Why renewable energy and childcare pay off for everyone

The Real Cost of Cheap Government

History books are replete with nations carrying towering debts, yet boasting impressive infrastructure. Japan, for instance, has a debt exceeding 250 percent of its GDP, but its trains run punctually and its infrastructure outshines North America’s.

On the other hand, the United States, with deficits that are relatively smaller, is grappling with a more tangible problem-bridges collapsing into rivers. The difference here is not just in numbers, but in the real-life consequences. You can survive debt, but you cannot survive the pothole that swallows your car or the hospital bed that's not there when you need it.

Debt is just ink on paper. The real bankruptcies are the missed opportunities. Now, I’m no fancy economist, but when the road eats my axle, I start doubting all this “fiscal responsibility” talk.

Pay The Road Once, Or Pay The Mechanic Forever

It's like choosing between paying for a well-constructed road once, or constantly shelling out for a mechanic to fix your car. Anyone who’s white-knuckled a steering wheel down a frost-heaved county road knows the score: the pothole doesn’t care if the budget is “balanced.”

It charges its own tax, on blown tires, bent rims, wrecked suspensions, wheel alignments, higher insurance premiums, and wasted fuel from stop-and-crawl traffic. It also incurs costs in time: missed shifts, late school buses, ambulances slowed by ruts, and deliveries that arrive damaged and behind schedule. That’s not theory; that’s a bill with your name on it.

You can pay once, up front, with public money that smooths the asphalt, shortens commutes, lowers repair costs, and boosts property values. Or you can keep paying the mechanic, the tow truck, the body shop, and the insurer, month after month, so a politician can brag about “saving” a few dollars on maintenance. That’s the absurdity of austerity: it turns infrastructure into a slot machine that always wins against the driver. Real investment is cheaper because it kills the hidden tax at the source and leaves you with something useful, safe roads that put money back in your pocket every time you drive.

We save a nickel on maintenance and spent a dollar at the mechanic. Call it prudence if you can say it with a straight face.

A House Not Built Is A Debt You Carry For Life

Housing is the clearest example of political cowardice. Population surges while governments act like a timid landlord guarding an empty lot. The bill shows up as sky-high rents, mortgages that swallow half a paycheck, basement apartments rented at penthouse prices, and young families forced to choose between starting a life or servicing a bank. Every unit we don’t build becomes a silent lien on the future: longer commutes, overcrowded schools, stagnating wages as workers chase cheaper roofs, and a housing ladder where the bottom rungs have been sawed off.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Large-scale public building, paired with clear zoning, factory-built components, public land leases, and a trained workforce, cuts the cost curve where it actually bends: on land, approvals, and supply. Public projects set floor standards and ceiling prices, anchoring rents, stabilizing mortgages, and forcing private builders to compete on quality rather than price.

The math is simple: pay once to add supply and you lower monthly bills for decades; refuse to build and you lock families into lifetime payments for the privilege of a leaky roof. A house not built by public investment isn’t a savings, it’s a generational debt note stamped “due every month.

Health Bills Bankrupt Faster Than Taxes Ever Did

Look south and you see the warning label in bold: in the United States, is a mess while medical bills push millions to the edge every year. Canada’s single-payer system is a shield, but it’s getting dented, with ER closures, doctor shortages, long waits, travel for basic care, and private clinics selling “priority” to those who can pay.

Those cracks don’t show up on a tax form; they show up as maxed-out credit cards, lost paychecks, and illnesses that get worse because help came late. When governments underfund care, the invoice doesn’t vanish; it’s handed to families in the form of debt, missed work, and avoidable grief.

The fix is not complicated, just adult: invest where the costs start. Train and retain nurses and family doctors, expand community clinics and urgent care capacity, fund home care and long-term care adequately, and cover essentials such as prescriptions, mental health, and dental care. Every dollar spent on prevention and primary care saves many more in ER bills and hospital stays.

That’s the math that matters. Taxes didn’t send anyone into bankruptcy court; a surprise diagnosis and a thin system did. Spend on healthcare like it’s the nation’s backbone, because it is, and you protect both wallets and lives.

Cheap Power Beats Cheap Talk

Politicians promise “energy independence” while writing subsidies to oil and gas, as if it were still 1975. Meanwhile, China plows staggering sums into renewables, batteries, and high-voltage grids, capital that buys decades of fuel-free power. That’s the quiet secret: fossil energy rents you yesterday’s heat at tomorrow’s price; clean energy buys you tomorrow’s electricity at yesterday’s cost.

Once you build solar, wind, storage, and transmission, the fuel bill rounds to zero, and the price volatility tax disappears. Treat deficits like tools, point them at permanent capacity, and you don’t just lower emissions, you flatten household bills for a generation.

The playbook isn’t mystical. Build a continental grid that moves cheap power to where people live. Pair utility-scale wind and solar with storage, then carpet rooftops and parking lots with panels so neighborhoods make their own daytime juice. Swap leaky furnaces for heat pumps, backstop hospitals and grocery stores with batteries, and bring factories home to assemble the gear.

Every mile of new wire and every turbine blade is a down payment on lower bills and steadier jobs, from rural co-ops to city co-ops. Pay once for durable infrastructure and you retire the monthly drama of fuel spikes. Cheap talk won’t power your fridge; cheap power will.

School Debt Is A Shackle To Us

Education is supposed to open doors, not lock ankles. Yet across North America, students walk off the stage with diplomas in one hand and decades of payments in the other. That’s not a rite of passage; it’s a wealth trap. Governments talk about “personal responsibility” while treating education like a luxury good, then wonder why homeownership falls, startups stall, and whole regions bleed talent.

When a graduate leaves school debt-free, they rent an apartment without a cosigner, buy a car that actually starts in winter, and take a shot at building something. When they leave with $50,000 chained to their name, everything gets postponed: marriage, kids, risk-taking, retirement savings, and the economy loses the very energy it claims to need.

The fix isn’t complicated; it’s a choice. Fund education as an investment, not an ornament. Expand grants, cut tuition, cap interest, and build out apprenticeships and short, paid training that lead to real jobs. Tie public dollars to outcomes, completion rates, employment, and wage growth, so institutions have a vested interest in the process. Do that, and the returns are obvious: higher earnings, stronger communities, more small businesses, fewer bankruptcies. Austerity in education doesn’t save a dime; it mortgages the future. School debt is a shackle. The key, public investment that lowers costs at the front end, has been on the desk the whole time.

Childcare Is Cheaper Than Poverty

Childcare is one of the strongest wealth generators a country can invest in. When it’s affordable and reliable, parents, especially mothers, can work full-time, take promotions, and keep skills fresh instead of falling off the career ladder. Employers get stable teams, kids get safe learning, and families stop burning through savings to patch together care from relatives and canceled shifts.

The effect stacks: higher take-home pay, steadier taxes, fewer welfare cliff dives, and more small businesses started by parents who finally have predictable hours. Call it what it is, public investment that pays for itself in household budgets, not someday, but this Friday.

Starve childcare, and the bills show up everywhere else. Parents cut their hours or quit, incomes shrink, rents fall behind, credit card debt swells, and talent sits idle. At the same time, boardrooms boast about “productivity.” Children miss early learning that boosts school success and lifetime earnings.

Meanwhile, governments pay more later, income supports, emergency aid, and the lost taxes from careers that never took off. Austerity hawks label childcare a “cost” because they never add the other columns. The math is simple enough for kindergarten: pay less now for care, or pay far more later for poverty.

One builds wealth; the other bills it monthly.

The Flood You Don’t Prevent Is The Bill You Can’t Pay

We’re past debating the weather. Fires, floods, heat waves, and hurricanes now arrive like tax season, predictable in the big picture, ruinous in the details. Every sandbag not filled, every culvert not widened, every substation not raised out of the floodplain turns into a future invoice stamped “urgent.”

The costs don’t just show up as broken bridges and washed-out highways; they show up as closed small businesses, gutted homes, spiked insurance premiums, and municipal budgets blown to pieces. Prevention isn’t charity. It’s the only affordable line item left when nature’s balance sheet comes due.

Build the levee, restore the wetland, bury the power lines, harden the grid, update the building codes, and fund the firefighters before the smoke. Those dollars pay for fewer evacuations, faster recoveries, and neighborhoods that don’t spend a decade clawing back from one bad weekend.

Yet governments still count pennies up front and write blank checks afterward, congratulating themselves for “fiscal prudence” as the cleanup bills pile higher than the floodwaters. That isn’t prudence, it’s negligence with a press release. The disaster you avert is the fortune you keep. The flood you don’t prevent is the bill you can’t pay, and the envelope lands in every mailbox on the block.

We pinch pennies in spring and write blank checks in autumn, and the flood keeps the change.

The Hidden Tax Is The Glass Of Dirty Water

Ask Flint, Michigan, what austerity looks like when it comes out of the tap. When governments cut corners on treatment plants, skip routine testing, or hollow out food inspection and emergency response, the price doesn’t disappear; it migrates to the ER, to the pharmacy, to the funeral home, and to paychecks docked for days spent sick. The ledger still balances, just not where budget hawks want to see it. The savings are political; the costs are painfully personal.

Clean water, safe food, and reliable emergency services are not frills; they’re the cheapest insurance a society can buy. Fund the lab technicians and inspectors, maintain redundancy in the system, and replace brittle pipes before they burst. By doing so, you can prevent outbreaks instead of managing scandals.

That’s money that never needs to be raised in charity drives or borrowed on a credit card. A glass of dirty water is a bigger tax than any line on your return because it bills you in health, time, and grief. Pay a little upfront for safety, or pay endlessly for the damage; those are the only two choices on the menu.

The Rich Will Get Their Slice; Make Them Bake The Bread

Here’s the ugly truth: the wealthy get paid either way. Starve the public sector, and they cash in on scarcity, with higher rents, hospital bills, and tolls on everything we failed to build. Shower them with tax cuts and they skim again, through buybacks, asset bubbles, and monopoly markups. The trick isn’t to block wealth; it’s to change how it’s earned. Tie gains to work, risk, and results, not to handouts and engineered shortages.

Spend to build housing, grids, transit, care, and the money doesn’t disappear into a balance sheet mirage. It turns into contracts with conditions, open bidding, clawbacks for failure, and public equity stakes where appropriate. If the wealthy want a share, fine, let them pour concrete, stand up factories, train workers, and hit performance targets. Profit then comes from productivity, not from political favors.

This flips the game. Instead of taxing you with potholes and scarcity, we pay once to raise capacity and drop everyday bills. The rich still do well, but by delivering value, we can touch more homes, cheaper power, shorter ER waits, rather than skimming value we can’t. Wealth should follow work and valuable investment. Make the penthouse earn its view.

Deficits Are Tools, Not Monsters

Here’s the truth most politicians won’t say out loud: deficits are simply tools. They can be used to cut your costs and build wealth, or they can be squandered on tax cuts for the wealthy and subsidies for the powerful. The U.S. has run up enormous deficits but wasted them on excess asset inflation and military bloat.

In contrast, Japan ran up even bigger deficits and left behind functioning trains and livable cities. The difference is discipline: not how much you spend, but what you spend it on. Spend like a country, use your currency power to invest. Invest like a prudent individual, lower long-term costs, and grow wealth. That’s the formula nobody seems willing to admit. 

Debt never ruined a country; neglect did quietly, then all at once.

About the Author

Robert Jennings is the co-publisher of InnerSelf.com, a platform dedicated to empowering individuals and fostering a more connected, equitable world. A veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps and the U.S. Army, Robert draws on his diverse life experiences, from working in real estate and construction to building InnerSelf with his wife, Marie T. Russell, to bring a practical, grounded perspective to life’s challenges. Founded in 1996, InnerSelf.com shares insights to help people make informed, meaningful choices for themselves and the planet. More than 30 years later, InnerSelf continues to inspire clarity and empowerment.

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Article Recap

Government spending, when done wisely, lowers costs and raises individual wealth. From housing to healthcare, energy to education, deficits that build capacity leave people richer and more secure. It isn’t the size of the debt that matters, but whether it buys opportunities instead of squandering them.

#GovernmentSpending #IndividualWealth #PublicInvestment #LowerCosts #SmartDeficits #Infrastructure #Healthcare #Housing #RenewableEnergy