leesssfucking go, sir

TL;DR**: America is fiscally fucked:**

The issue at hand, then, is not that faster growth would fail to help. It is that the growth required to solve the growing debt problem in a timely manner itself bears little resemblance to anything the mature US economy has sustained historically. And even the above calculations grant Washington extraordinarily favorable assumptions: no primary deficits, no further fiscal deterioration, a stable effective interest rate, and decades in which the benefits of growth are not converted into additional spending. Against an aging population, slowing labor force growth, rising debt service, enormous unfunded commitments, and a heavier fiscal and regulatory burden, sustained 7.3 percent real growth is not a plausible debt strategy. It is what remains after every difficult political choice — spending restraint, entitlement reform, taxation, and fiscal discipline — has been assumed away.

The quotes/literal bangers throughout this piece are amaze:

merely stabilizing the federal debt burden through economic growth — without spending cuts, tax increases, or additional borrowing — would require something on the order of 7.3 percent annual real GDP growth

That estimate

... assumed Washington would immediately stop adding to the debt and that faster growth would not generate higher interest rates or additional spending. Even under those indulgent assumptions, sustained growth of 7.3 percent is not remotely realistic.

This isn't just a nominal-real divide where all you have to do is up the inflation rate (brrr......) for a few quarters:

Inflation may enlarge the denominator in the debt-to-GDP ratio, but it is not a free fiscal lunch: bondholders eventually demand compensation for lost purchasing power, maturing Treasury securities refinance at higher rates, indexed federal expenditures rise, and the government’s interest bill compounds.

"The United States has never sustained seven percent real growth for a meaningful period as a mature peacetime economy."

From 1983 through 1989, the celebrated Reagan expansion averaged approximately 4.4 percent; across the entire 1980s, including two recessions, growth averaged about 3.2 percent. The historical record contains isolated seven percent years, but it does not contain a durable seven percent economy.

...but 3% is almost 7%, no?

Nope, and we're not in the same universe anymore:

• Back then, labor-force growth by 1% annually, but now it's rapidly approaching 0
• The 1980s were forward-looking and filled with tech, today's CBO econ projects are about 2% (even including our wacky experiments into dubiously productivity-enhancing AIs, which might add 0.1% to productivity sustainably)

Artificial intelligence does not close the gap. AI might make the economy 5 or 10 percent larger over a decade, which would be enormously valuable, but a one-time increase in the level of productivity is not the same as adding five percentage points to its growth rate every year.

With little expansion in the number of workers, reaching 7.3 percent would require roughly five additional percentage points of economy-wide productivity growth — not for one recovery year, but repeatedly. Nothing in modern American economic history supports such an assumption.

The fiscal burden also extends beyond current tax receipts. CBO projects that federal outlays will equal 23.3 percent of GDP in 2026 and rise to 24.4 percent by 2036⁠, with an increasing share devoted to Social Security, Medicare, and interest rather than infrastructure or other investments that might increase productive capacity. Interest expense is especially damaging because it purchases no new public service or productive asset; it is the current fiscal cost of past consumption.

oops. So, what's left? YOU GUESSED IT, we gotta fleece the boomers. Fuck them, royally. Take their stuff, send them to prison, cancel their pesky social-security checks -- that sort of thing. #1521908, #1527198, #1537004

aah, Den looks forward to this future

The AI dream is not your savior:

General-purpose technologies require complementary investment, organizational redesign, worker training, and new infrastructure. Electricity and computers produced immense benefits, but their economy-wide effects diffused over decades rather than appearing instantly.

Also, hidden taxation is making life and fiscal matters worse:

Other fiscal impediments compound the problem. The combined employer-employee payroll-tax rate has risen from approximately 12.3 percent in 1980 to 15.3 percent today, as shown in the Social Security Administration’s historical tax-rate tables⁠. That increase enlarges the wedge between what employers pay and workers receive at precisely the time an aging population is slowing labor-force growth.

"The United States can grow faster, and AI, deregulation, tax simplification, and fiscal reform could lift productivity appreciably."