Frugality for people most definitely has its place, for those that are unable to pay their bills, may easily find themselves placed into a position in which such non-payment will result in the loss of their vehicle, the loss of their home, the loss of their credit capacity, and so on and so forth. There are many people that are able to juggle their debts, but still suffer for being in debt, because of the massive interest payments that must be paid to their creditors as well as often being placed into a dubious credit category which means higher interest rates, often less credit capacity, in addition to the fact that some potential employers look at the credit scores of their applicants, equating to less job opportunity. Clearly, then, for people, mishandled debt is bad, though, many people deliberately get into debt for school, for their vehicle, for their home, and are able to handle responsibly such debt, primarily because their earning capacity along with their overall budget savvy aids them in doing so.
Most of our State governments have balance budget amendments so that they are constrained in their spending in which these State budgets take into account anticipated revenues from their taxpayers as well as other payers in a given fiscal year which is thereby balanced against the legislated budget. Yet, for whatever reason, the federal government does not have a balance budget amendment, which might be fine, if that government demonstrated its frugality in its expenditures, or a realistic plan that made some sort of fiscal sense, or the proven capacity to responsibly handle such debt, but in fact, the 21st century clearly indicates that the emperor has no clothes, for at the completion of Clinton's final year in office, the national deficit, rested at $5.629 trillion dollars, whereas as of July 6, 2017, as estimated by treasurydirect.gov the national deficit had risen to an astonishing amount of $19.844 trillion dollars.
While there may be legitimate reasons for any government to run a deficit, such as the procurement of land, for infrastructure, because of a foreign war that threatens their very way of life, because of a recession or depression, or some other national emergency, the fact of the matter is that the United States primarily runs such massive deficits because the legislative and executive branches of this government, does not have the courage to either get their house in order by spending monies within a balance budget, and/or has not the courage to raise taxes on the people and other institutions that pay taxes to the federal government.
The problem that our present-day government has is that for whatever reason, it desires to provide benefits and services to designated people and institutions, but knows that in order to pay for such things, it would have to confiscate too much in taxes from those that would either be unwilling to pay such or have not the ready capacity to do so. All this really does is to kick the can down the road, a road in which rather than taxing appropriately its people and living within its means today, the country has divided itself into those that reap the benefits of not having to pay their fair share by receiving more than their fair share presently, while essentially sticking the responsibility of that lack of keeping their fiscal house in order, onto the youngest generation or even generations yet unborn, because eventually those that are the creditors of these massive deficits will receive their payments off of the backs of those still alive to pay it, irrespective of the fairness, the legitimacy, or their capacity to pay such.