You are right. But note that in order to contradict me on the surface, you are in fact agreeing with my point by starting to shift the conversation away from no

You are right. But note that in order to contradict me on the surface, you are in fact agreeing with my point by starting to shift the conversation away from nominal terms like the deficit and towards real resources -- which is the correct framing! The next steps are to recognize and integrate into the conversation that: * Whether and to what extent the government consumes resources that would otherwise have been consumed by somebody else cannot be determined purely by looking at the deficit as a single number. A government deficit, when done right, stimulates the economy which means that it causes the creation of resources that otherwise simply wouldn't have been created. * Inflation, which is what you're really getting at, is complicated and has many potential drivers. A government deficit can be one of them, but isn't necessarily. There are many other potential drivers: overly lax monetary policy, excessive bank lending, entirely internal mechanism such as genuine supply shocks, businesses' price hikes in an attempt to increase profits, strong unions helping drive up wages broadly across the economy, and so on. Note that some of these effects, especially the last one, are actually desirable for most people, meaning that inflation can actually be a good thing for society overall! Admittedly that happens rarely in practice, but that's really a function of workers having too little power. It all depends on the details. In fact, on that last point there's reason to suspect that we'd have had quite a bit lower "effective" inflation (meaning higher purchasing power of wages / salary) for the majority of the population today if governments had decided to address the Global Financial Crisis by direct job creation and handing out money to the population at large, rather than leaning on monetary policy which really only caused asset prices to balloon. This alternative policy wasn't even discussed seriously, because people largely do not understand that the government cannot default. Discussion was shut down with slogans like "making sure that the US is not going to be the next Greece", which are complete nonsense given that the US and Greek governments operate under very different currency arrangements (sovereign currency like Japan, vs. the effectively foreign currency of the Euro in Greece's case). So anyway, the point is that the framing in real resources matters significantly, precisely because there is no ironclad correlation between government deficits and real resources. People need to learn to go into the real resources framing and then stay there.