The federal budget is often compared to a household budget. But it's not that simple

Well, the long-awaited Federal Budget is out next Tuesday. "Often you'll hear politicians talking about 'we need to live within our means', for instance, and draw a direct comparison between the government budget and the household budget," said Leonora Risse, an economist at RMIT. "The government spends money and accumulates debt to rebuild opportunities for people's jobs, expand GDP, create more business confidence in the future, and to get the economy rolling again so that it does have capacity to repay that debt," Dr Risse said. Let's talk about spending more than we earn So, a budget deficit is another way of saying the Federal Government will be spending more than the revenue it receives. But remember, the Government budget's main goal is to help the economy and that's why they'll be spending more than they receive this year.