Is there any reason to believe this is a bad way of thinking about the budget?

Like many people without much interest in economics, I tend toward the household-budget view of how the federal government should spend money. On some level, I get the macroeconomic argument that the government should spend more in a recession, but when one has no faith that the government will spend less in good times, it's hard to embrace that position.

So I read Jim Manzi's post on controlling the national debt with great interest. Unfortunately, the argument in the comments is almost completely about the Paul Ryan budget plan, rather than the general approach.

The ball we need to keep our eye on is not so much the theoretical ultimate cost, as how much time we have left before we crash. We should want a set of entitlement rules that we believe to be sustainable in perpetuity, but we need to push out the date at which we would have a crisis.

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A real plan to address our debt problems, then, should focus on two key elements: (1) putting in place mechanisms for influencing future legislatures that we cannot command, and (2) enacting structural reforms that will simultaneously encourage general economic growth as they do this.

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Like the FDR vision of the entitlement state that now appears to be in its death throes, whatever we put in place will eventually become antiquated and have to be replaced. Our job is to make sure that this happens 75 years from now, not 10 years from now.

Still thinking about this, but it seems more sensible (and more realistic about the sort of prudence that is possible in the political realm) than the household-budget approach.