ABSTRACT
The balanced budget at low levels, except in wartime, was the crucial compromise that allowed these three social orders to coexist. From the middle of the seventeenth century to the second decade of the twentieth century, America's difference from rather than its similarity to Europe's approach to a budgetary process is striking. The history of American attitudes toward public debt may be translated into formulas for relating revenues to expenditures that are no less powerful for being simple. The subject of internal improvements may be taken broadly to include any sort of governmental subsidy for any purpose whatsoever, and not just those subsidies for roads and canals that gave the controversy its historical name. Advocates of markets might generally wish lower taxes and spending, but they always stood ready to accept subsidies that would diffuse the costs of sustaining commerce over a range of taxpayers.
