But you conveniently forget the many years of Democratic deficit spending, and how they laughed at Republican calls for balanced budgets even as recently as the Clinton administration. Remember when Keynes was The Man in the liberal circles? Articles like this were not a rare exception, but were typical of the contempt the Left had for the conservative concept of a balanced budget (I'm not going to bother dissecting the mistakes in the article, I'm just showing the attitude).

This article is also interesting, and not only mentions the dreaded political Third Rail, but sticks its metaphorical tongue on it.

...James Fallows in "Entitlements" (November, 1982), and, eleven years later, Peter Peterson in "Facing Up" (October, 1993), both argued that entitlements distributed to the middle class account for the largest unnecessary drain on the federal budget. Social Security, Medicare, civil service pensions, and military retirement pay, they explained, dole out significant sums annually to many already financially comfortable. In "Entitlements," Fallows traced the history of such programs, and suggested that well-meaning reforms with unforeseen consequences are what led to the problematic and unsustainable entitlement system in the first place. Both authors argued that the middle-class must learn to sacrifice the government-financed windfalls to which it had become accustomed. Fallows wrote: "Our national accounts will remain out of balance until we wrestle with the IOUs that middle-class America has issued to itself, through Social Security and Medicare." Peterson concurred: "Most Americans--emphatically including the middle class--will have to give something up, at least temporarily, to get back our American Dream."

Now, of course, like many other conservative ideas that turn out to be good ones (welfare reform is another), the Democrats tout balanced budgets as though they thought it had been a swell idea for decades. They are assuming that most voters aren't going to bother to check the facts. Unfortunately, they're probably right.