Don Boudreaux makes a cutsie analogy about trade deficits by comparing country or state deficits with hair color deficits. After all if random group X has to worry, why not random group Y? However, this part gave me pause:

Now suppose that you’re a blonde, but one of the relatively few blondes who is not currently spending more than you’re earning.

It’s like he’s writing directly to me.

OK, not all blondes are spendthrifts, but I sometimes feel like the lone blonde saver in a nation full of blondes. To wit, the other day on the radio a conservative was droning on about how schools were terrible, and those that wanted to blame parents were out of line. Something to the effect of “You tell the parent who comes home tired for their one 15 minutes of quiet today from their ten hour job and extra job on weekends just to make ends meet that they’re the problem, yeah right.” Um, if you are that stretched, you think you should have waited on the kids, or maybe moved someplace cheaper and taken the longer commute? Or rented? Or bought a smaller house? Or lived for a year without HBO? And yes, folks, that was an (alleged) conservative, which tells you a lot about the causes of the current Administration’s spending-to-income ratio.