The Middle Class Supports: Pay-As-You-Go spending rules mandate fiscal responsibility: Congress must consider carefully before spending or giving away in the form of tax cuts money it doesn’t have. The 60-vote supermajority rule is intended to institutionalize this careful consideration. While deficit spending can provide needed economic stimulus during a recession, the unrestrained deficit-inducing tax cuts of the past few years were ill-considered, with little job creation to show for them. Instead, running deficits year after year has led to little more than ballooning debt and the need to repeatedly extend the federal debt limit. Middle-class families, threatened with increasingly dire consequences by bills like the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention Act (see page 9) when they depart from a pay-as-you-go routine in their household finances, are made to bear the burden of the government’s fiscal irresponsibility. Down the line, a higher debt weakens the dollar and fosters inflation. If deficit spending provided sound investments and economic stimulus, inflation would not dramatically undercut the middle class. But in the absence of higher wages, inflation makes basic necessities harder for middle-class families to afford and threatens to lower the country’s standard of living.