> The Marxist argument (I believe) is not that a balanced budget would
>improve economic performance; rather the argument is that overcoming
>stagnation and downturns through deficits tends to create its own
>problems over time (heightens the contradictions and all that):
I don't disagree with that at all. I was just objecting to your claims about the present fiscal situation of the U.S., which is actually quite sound by conventional measures.
>I would like to say that this may all be true and if it is true, then
>Marxism is dead.
Why? If you define Marxism as a theory of an inevitable terminal crisis of capitalism - which I think is always the point of the whole value-theorizing tradition, though they've gotten shy about admitting it in the late 1990s - yes, it is. But if you define Marxism as a theory of capitalism as a social system based on exploitation, which is unstable, polarizing, and destructive by its very nature, then Marxism has lot of life left in it.
Doug