The phenomenon of chronic, excessive budget deficits in western democracies has brought on many explanations and interpretations in both the empirical and theoretical literature. However, popular political economy and/or public choice textbooks present those explanations not in an integrated framework but are instead focusing on one special motif to create budget deficits at a time. This is probably owed to the fact that the ‘standard’ explanations of budget deficit are based on more or less complex economic models which require intertemporal optimization. The analysis of these models is usually technically demanding which leads to the fact that the basic principles of budget deficits and public debt are by and large taught to graduate students only.[…]