Several commentators have posited that President Obama should focus on the federal deficit during tonight’s State of the Union address, explaining to America how he will rein in a supposedly out of control budget. Obama should “spend the bulk of his time talking about the deficit,” wrote the Post’s Chris Cillizza. “When President Obama delivers his State of the Union address Tuesday evening, here’s one thing you won’t hear: an ambitious new plan to rein in the national debt,” bemoaned the Washington Post’s Lori Montgomery.

But this is completely backwards. With unemployment stubbornly hovering around 8 percent, Obama’s focus should be on jobs and economic growth, not the deficit. Here are seven reasons why:

1. Deficits are shrinking. According to the latest projections from the Congressional Budget Office, over the last few years, $4.5 trillion in deficits have been reduced. In August 2010, CBO’s “alternative fiscal scenario” projected a deficit in 2020 of 7.8 percent of GDP. Now it projects that deficit will be 4.7 percent of GDP.

2. The debt is all but stabilized. CBO noted that the debt is basically stabilized, peaking at 77.7 percent of GDP in 2014, then dropping to 73.1 percent in 2018 before rising slightly again in 2022. According to the Economic Policy Institute, an additional $670 billion in deficit reduction is enough to fully stabilize the debt, which is less than half of the additional deficit reduction Obama has called for.

3. Spending growth is slow. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said over the weekend that spending is not a problem, and the stabilizing debt and falling deficit show that she’s right. Under Obama, spending is growing at its slowest rate since the Eisenhower administration. Tax revenue, meanwhile, hit lows not seen since World War II over the last few years.

4. The output gap is huge and job growth is slow. As economist Adam Hersh noted, $900 billion more in economic activity is required to fill the “output gap,” the difference between what the economy is producing now and what it needs to produce to create full employment. CBO projects that the unemployment rate will not fall below 6 percent until 2018. The U.S. still needs 3 million jobs just to make up for those lost during the Great Recession.

5. Austerity is killing the recovery. CBO anticipates that economic growth will be slow this year due to “fiscal tightening that has already begun or is scheduled to occur.” European countries that have cut spending in an attempt to reduce their debts have, instead, quashed economic growth while their deficits barely moved (or expanded). Federal Reserve Vice Chair Janet Yellen yesterday blasted Congress for allowing fiscal policy to be a “headwind for the recovery.”

6. Infrastructure investment is collapsing. Public investment has plunged since the Great Recession. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, America’s infrastructure deficit stands at $1.6 trillion and will grow to $2.75 trillion over the next decade, which will cost the country $3 trillion in wasted economic potential and 3.5 million jobs.

7. Borrowing rates are incredibly low. The cost of borrowing for the U.S. has been low for years, plunging to record lows over the summer. This provides a golden opportunity for government to borrow money and create jobs while making valuable public investments.

The European economy is still struggling to recover from the Great Recession as its leaders have chosen to focus on deficits and debt instead of unemployment and growth. But at a speech in Miami, JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon seemingly ignored the struggling European economies and praised leaders there for having a “will” to cut deficits that the United States doesn’t yet have:

DIMON: What I’ll say about Europe is they have the will. Listen to their politicians. Their politicians say, “There is no Plan B. The Euro will not be dissolved.” The way is very complicated and will take many years. The United States is the opposite. We know exactly the way. It’s something called like a Simpson-Bowles, we’ve seen a lot of different plans come out. We don’t yet have the will. The United States is a far simpler problem.

The “will” European leaders have is one that has wreaked havoc on the continent’s economy. The mad dash to cut deficits and debts has pushed country after country into recession, and the Eurozone itself slipped back into a recession in November. Eurozone unemployment reached a record-high of 11.8 percent in January, and 18.8 million Europeans remain unemployed. In Spain, unemployment rose above 26 percent at the end of 2012, and 56 percent of young workers are unemployed. Britain is on the brink of a triple-dip recession, and its lack of growth has thwarted its deficit-reduction efforts. Greece’s unemployment rate is 26.8 percent. Even Germany, the stalwart European economy, is experiencing a slowdown.

The United States, meanwhile, took a different approach, choosing to spend nearly a trillion dollars to stimulate the economy. As a result, America has outpaced Europe since the Great Recession. Still, unemployment remains unbearably high and growth slower than it should be, and efforts to reduce the debt and deficits are only complicating the recovery.

Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) on Monday offered up a constitutional amendment which would make failure to balance the nation’s budget an impeachable offense.

Brooks’ outlandish proposal calls for a balanced budget within five years, after which time federal spending could not exceed federal revenue. If the country were to face a deficit, Brooks’ bill demands that the President take “such steps as are necessary” to avoid excess spending. But under Brooks’ plan, there’s only one thing the President can do to avoid a deficit, as only one side of the balance sheet is open to negotiation:

“The President may not order any increase in taxes or other revenue measures to enforce the Amendment,” the bill reads. “A President’s failure to prevent a prohibited fiscal year deficit is an impeachable offense.”

Brooks is the latest Republican to suggest that revenue measures are off the table after Democrats and Republicans agreed to allow the Bush-era tax cuts to expire for those earning more than $450,000 a year as part of the “fiscal cliff” negotiations. But even with increased tax revenues, the deficit reduction President Obama has overseen since 2011 has still favored spending cuts over increased revenue by a 3 to 1 margin.

Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) recently gained some attention by strongly advocating that the Obama administration defuse the coming debt ceiling standoff by minting a $1 trillion platinum coin. “It would normally not be proper to consider such a thing, except when you’re faced with blackmail to destroy the country’s economy, you have to consider things,” he said.

The platinum coin may have been ruled out as an option, but that doesn’t mean Nadler is stepping back from economic policy. In an interview with the Business Insider, Nadler had some choice words for Washington’s obsession with deficit reduction, even as unemployment is well over 7 percent. “I think the deficit is not our immediate problem, our immediate problem is unemployment,” he said. He also correctly noted that austerity is killing Europe’s economy:

I think the deficit is not our immediate problem, our immediate problem is unemployment and frankly, I think right now, we should be running a higher deficit, temporarily, to get the economy into high gear.

We’re in a very slow recovery, unnecessarily so. The deficit has come down from 10.1% percentage in 2009, to 7.1% now, without doing anything. I mean if we could have unemployment down to 5%, which it was in 2005, that would reduce the deficit by 40% by itself. I think this austerity policy of chasing this whole grand bargain thing, I don’t agree with. I don’t think we should be cutting spending at all, except the spending that is really unnecessary, like the military. [...]

I think trying to reduce the deficit right now is wrong, because this position is going to keep the economy in the doldrums and keep the depression going longer and it’s self-defeating.

You look at Europe. I often say in my speeches, I say, it’s rare in life that you get a controlled scientific experiment. Cause you can’t do controlled scientific experiments with real people, normally. But you have it, and if you grasp the economics of the economic recoveries from 2007 in Europe and the United States, they matched, until 2010, when they start to collapse. And then it diverges, and we keep going up, slowly.

Many economists agree with Nadler’s take. “The chorus of people advocating for a long-term deficit plan NOW, NOW, NOW, drowns out the more urgent need for job creation,” said Economic Policy Institute President Lawrence Mishel. “We are having the wrong conversation. Let’s focus on jobs and restoring wage growth.”

Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman added, “the whole deficit panic is fundamentally misplaced.” Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, meanwhile, wrote “we’re a very long way from the job growth we need to get out of the gravitational pull of the Great Recession. That would be at least 300,000 new jobs per month. All of which means job growth and wage growth should be the central focus of economic policy, not deficit reduction.”

According to data from the Treasury Department, the U.S.’s monthly budget deficit all but vanished in December, coming in at just $260 million. Analysts had expected a $1 billion deficit for the month:

The U.S. government budget deficit narrowed to its most favorable December monthly result in five years, reflecting higher revenue, lower spending and calendar- driven shifts in some monthly payments.

The shortfall last month shrank almost completely to $260 million from $86 billion in December 2011, according to Treasury Department data issued today in Washington. The gap was smaller than the $1 billion median estimate in a Bloomberg survey of economists. Through the first three months of this fiscal year, the deficit was 9.1 percent smaller than the same period last year.

This was the best December result since 2007, before the financial crisis began. Monthly deficits can be a bit volatile, to be sure, but the low number is still a sign that the nation’s finances are moving in the right direction.

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, $1.4 trillion in deficit reduction over the next ten years would be enough to stabilize and eventually reduce U.S. debt. And for that number to be truly balanced — once all of the budget deals crafted since 2011 are taken into account — it would have to be composed of about 90 percent new revenue. 75 percent of the deficit reduction achieved by the Obama administration and Congressional Republicans has been via spending cuts.

While Republicans this year are claiming President Obama wants to balloon the size of government, reality tells a different story: not only has public sector employment fallen under the current administration, but Obama has succeeded in making significant cuts to wasteful contractor spending. Expenditures on independent contractors in the first half of 2012 dropped by 28 percent relative to the same period in 2010, the $13.1 billion dollars spent this year coming in well ahead of the Obama Administration’s target for cuts to contractor spending.

Contractors from large firms are often employed in place of standard federal employees, a process which costs the government a several billion dollar per year premium:

Federal contracts in 12 targeted consulting areas totaled $43 billion in fiscal 2010, with companies such as Lockheed Martin, Deloitte and Booz Allen Hamilton Holding among the biggest recipients of awards.

“Sometimes agencies are spending money on consultants to write reports that really don’t go anywhere — they sit on the shelf,” Jeff Zients, then-deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, said when he announced the goal. “Some of these contracts are unnecessary and can be reduced.”

Independent evidence backs up Deputy Director Zients’ assessment. A report by the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight (POGO) found that the government “pay[s] contractors 1.83 times more than the government pays federal employees in total compensation, and more than 2 times the total compensation paid in the private sector for comparable services.” POGO researchers concluded that “the federal government is not doing a good job of obtaining genuine market prices, and therefore the savings often promised in connection with outsourcing services are not being realized.”

Indeed, the broader quest to outsource government functions to private entities seems to routinely end up costing states and the federal government significantly more money that it saves.

One federal contractor, Larry Allen of Allen Federal Business Partners, told Bloomberg Government that contracting profits would likely go up again in a Romney Administration, saying “You would have much more of a predisposition for outsourcing, and that could lead to an increase in service contracting.”

During an appearance on CNN’s Starting Point on Tuesday, Tea Party Express Chairwoman Amy Kremer refused to condemn the deficit increase that would result from Mitt Romney’s proposed tax cuts, suggesting that the group is more concerned about acting as a surrogate for the Republican candidate than promoting fiscal responsibility.

Romney would extend all of the Bush tax cuts, reduce all individual income tax rates by an additional 20 percent, lower the corporate rate from the current 35 percent to 25 percent, eliminate the Alternative Minimum Tax, the estate tax, Obamacare’s Medicare taxes on high-income individuals, and taxes on investment income for households under certain income levels. The former governor claims that he could recoup the lost revenue by closing unspecified “tax expenditures,” though economists predict that he would have to dramatically slash spending to pay for his tax cuts or add trillions to the national deficit.

But Kremer, one of the Tea Party’s most prominent advocates for lowering the debt, seemed unconcerned about Romney’s plan and characterized any discussion of how his $5 trillion in tax cuts would increase the deficit as “class warfare”:

MICHAEL NUTTER (MAYOR OF PHILADELPHIA): Let’s talk about the $5 trillion that Mr. Romney is going to add on to the debt by giving tax breaks to millionaires and billionaires. You must be against that.

KREMER: I think that — I mean, at the end of the day, it’s this class warfare that the administration and the left wants to play. It’s pitting the rich against the middle class. [...]

NUTTER: Mr. Romney says he wants to give tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires, which will cost $5 trillion in debt. You must be against that, right? Because you’re against spending and you’re against debt?

KREMER: I am against spending and I’m against increasing our debt and our deficit. And this president ran and he said he would cut our deficit in half by the first term. and if not, it would be a one-term proposition. And he hasn’t done that.

Watch it:

The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center estimates Romney’s plan “would reduce revenue by $480 billion below current policy in 2015, or $4.9 trillion over 10 years.”

Our guest blogger is Harsha Nahata, an intern at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Vice Presidential Candidate Paul Ryan has gained an undeserved reputation as a “fiscal hawk,” touting his “Path to Prosperity” budget as a responsible plan to rein in what he describes as a “path to debt and decline.” But Ryan’s votes in Congress show that he is as guilty as anyone of running up the nation’s debt.

A Center for American Progress Action Fund analysis shows that Ryan voted to add a grand total of $6.8 trillion to the federal debt during his time in Congress, voting for at least 65 bills that either reduced revenue or increased spending.

From 2001 to 2008, Congress passed legislation that increased the national deficit by a total of $4 trillion — the number grows to $6 trillion if you add in the how much those policies have cost through 2011. Ryan voted for 90 percent of these deficit increasing bills.

What did Ryan vote to spend on? Here is a break-down of his votes:

– Beginning with the Bush tax cuts, since 2001 Ryan has voted to add $2.5 trillion worth of tax cuts to the deficit.

– In the last 11 years, Paul Ryan voted for every bill that called for an increase in defense spending. In total, this has added $1.9 trillion to the deficit.

– Paul Ryan also voted to increase non-defense discretionary spending — the very thing he is pushing to cut now. He voted to spend $270 billion on Medicare Part D (all of which was unpaid for). He also added $80 billion to the deficit by voting for an agriculture bill in 2002, and he added another $20 billion in 2003 when he voted for changes to military retirement. Lastly, he voted for increased borrowing authority for flood insurance, adding yet another $17 billion to the deficit.

Plus, Ryan’s plan won’t really balance the budget — at least not for the foreseeable future. The Tax Policy Center calculates that under Ryan’s budget plan, the federal government would only raise revenue totaling 15.8 percent of GDP. This would still make the deficit 4 percent of GDP by 2022.

There is broad economic consensus among economists that the United States will eventually have to raise taxes to pay down the federal debt, economist Betsey Stevenson said in an interview with ThinkProgress. Raising taxes needed to be a part of the equation — along with spending cuts — to pay down the debt if America is going to “provide the goods and services provided by the government that the American public has said they want,” Stevenson said at the Center for American Progress’ conference on the middle class and the economy Wednesday:

STEVENSON: At the end of the day, we need to find a way once we’re out, once the economy’s recovered, we need to find a way to make sure we’re bringing in the revenues necessary to pay for the things that we want. What we often have in the political discussion is people aren’t going to find a way to bring those two things together. So one side might be emphasizing cutting the programs they don’t particularly like, or cutting taxes, but not in a way that’s going to bring those two things together. And you know, I think there’s wide consensus among economists that there is, that we are going to have to do something that involves raising more revenue, not cutting taxes, but in the long run, raising taxes and cutting spending. We’re going to have to do those two things in order to make sure we have a government that brings in the money necessary to provide the goods and services provided by the government that the American public has said they want.

Watch it:

The “wide consensus among economists” even includes two advisers to the Republican Party’s presidential candidate who supported raising revenues as part of a deficit reduction deal. But while a balanced approach to deficit and debt reduction may be the prescription offered by economists, it isn’t a view widely shared in the GOP. The party continues to oppose higher taxes on the wealthy and has instead proposed slashing tax rates, and during the party’s presidential primary, every candidate said he or she would veto a debt reduction package that contained $10 in spending cuts for every $1 in tax increases.

A growing number of Republicans is beginning to recognize that revenues should be a part of the equation, however. Breaking with the pledge they made to anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, Republican lawmakers have begun hinting that they support new ways of finding revenue.