“Sire… worse than a crime, you have committed an error,” said Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord. A crime is whatever the feds say it is. Often not what you think it ought to be. But an error is different. It is a left turn when you should have turned right. It is forgetting your wife’s birthday. It is a budget deficit, when you should have been running a surplus.

In the Big, Bad, Budget Abomination, for example, there are two huge errors. The obvious one: they increased the deficit. They chose more spending, not less – even more money they don’t have on programmes they don’t need. And they are doing it on such a large scale – with $2 trillion deficits – it is sure to blow up the entire US financial system.