In economics, which is what modern governments are really concerned with, the line between moral and immoral is often one of perspective. Money won't solve every problem, but it will clarify them and even effectively solve 99% of them. Economic justice, or the lack of it, is what lies at the root of most of our social issues as well.
The line I am referring to was drawn in '34 when FDR ended the convertibility of US dollars to gold to enable funding for his New Deal and, eventually, WWII. Then it was reinforced in '71 when Nixon withdrew us from the Bretton-Woods treaty and the gold standard in international trade. These immensely important changes in our economic system went all but unnoticed by our government and economists, but they turned almost all rules of economics on their heads.
A former New York Federal Reserve president, Beardsley Ruml, even wrote a paper in '45 stating that "Taxation For Revenue Is Obsolete". We have not yet unleashed the full power of our economy and our currency simply because the average citizen cannot visualize a world in which anything that can be resourced by the currency-issuing government is "affordable", even without revenue.
Citizens vote and voters choose their representatives, so even if many in government understand this, they aren't likely to give it the importance it deserves because, as the TEA party showed us, perception trumps reality in politics. We, the average citizens, "are" taxed too much, and the federal government doesn't spend enough on the public purpose, and those two things are not contradictory because the federal government is the monopoly issuer of US dollars, not dependent upon revenue.
This makes "ANY" suffering by the people that could be mitigated with additional public spending entirely a "political decision", not economics. That is the measure of performance our representatives should be held to, not their ability to "balance" the budget or act as a responsible "user" of the currency that we mostly pull out of our backsides when it is needed for wars or corporate profits.
