People miss #33 because they equate deficit with debt.
If your expenditures exactly match your income, then you have no deficit for the period in question.
If you have borrowed money, you will have debt. If you had an unresolved deficit in the past, you will have debt.
So, if you have existing debt, and this year's income equals this year's expenses, then you still have that debt when the year is done, even though you did not have a deficit.
The difference isn't even particularly subtle if you're paying attention, but we've had years of misinformation on the subject, so it's an easy enough mistake to make. (You will probably recall the Clinton administration's "balancing the budget" being presented as though it had somehow eliminated debt, when what it actually did was simply reduce that period's deficit to zero.)
If you were a math-oriented kind of person, the problem could be stated:
for the expression Dr = (I - E) + De
(where I is income, E is expenses, De is existing debt, and Dr is resulting debt)
(Oh, and don't forget that D [debt] will be a negative number.)
if I = E, what is the value of Dr?
This, of course, does not answer the distribution part of the question, but it does eliminate the "no debt" answer as a possibility.
