We are not in an age of permanent deficits; or at least the deficits that characterized the late 20th century were on track to being tamed until the beginning of the last decade.
The current deficit, however, is exactly one of the rare situations I'm talking about: the deficits are enormous because we're emerging from the deepest recession since the creation of the social safety net (and yet, in part due to the automatic spending of that safety net, this recession is still significantly shallower than any pre-safety net recession in the 19th or early 20th centuries). A temporary bump in spending due to short term emergency measures and automatic stabilizers, coupled with a drop in tax revenues, accounts for the current deficits. Neither of those situations is going to continue forever. And current U.S. law is projected to return the budget to balance (that's what the extended baseline scenario is):
Granted, Congress may (indeed, probably will) choose not to adhere to existing law but then I'm not convinced a BBA would convince them to do that either. The current temporary large deficits are an artifact of the current situation and shouldn't be confused with our long-term debt concerns.
The reality is that there's a distinction between short term deficits and our long-term debt situation. Melding the two to lend credence to your policy preferences regarding the latter is a tad disingenuous. However, I'll point out the obvious: the energy spent pushing a BBA would be much better spent building political will for an actual policy change (or even just building the will to adhere to existing law--the extended baseline scenario). We don't need a new rule to be evaded, we need a concrete fiscal strategy and the political will to maintain it. How many votes did Bowles-Simpson get?
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