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It’s not solvable. Because even if you make great progress; someone like a criminal president comes along and spends it all on favors. True story.

The President does not have power of the purse. The House proposes a budget. The President can't spend beyond what Congress approves, and can't really decline to spend anything that Congress has approved (i.e. "impoundment").

That’s where theory and practice diverge

Right right because the Republican party ever even once denied Trump what he wanted before 6/01

> Because even if you make great progress; someone like a criminal president comes along and spends it all on favors.

That’s always a possibility, but as we’ve seen with the recent attempt to spend $500B to pay off student loans, the SCOTUS does a decent job of stopping the truly egregious.

> I think this has more to do with the US spending itself into debt in an unsustainable way.

Government debt and household debt don't work the same way.

This a common fallacy that serves political ends, but they are not directly comparable.

> Government debt and household debt don't work the same way

In what way? Enlighten us. Are you a MMT proponent? That's a bullshit theory that's fallen on its face pretty spectacularly since 2021. The debt has to be paid, either with inflation or taxes or both. Household debt also has to be paid with income (households don't have the moeny printing option, but that's not a get-out-of-jail free card either.) The US has been spending $1 to get $0.20 of GDP growth. That's not only unsustainable by any measure, it's also just lighting money on fire. The most egregious venture-backed sell-a-dollar-for-50-cents startups don't have a track record that bad.

> This a common fallacy that serves political ends

I don't care for what you're implying. Careful not to assume too much about me, you'll be wrong.

I'm not sure we're far enough out to really say for sure if MMT has been disproven by the events since 2021. The global pandemic, supply chain issues, and the war in Ukraine all muddy the water. The previous administration also squandered a lot of debt on tax breaks for the ultra wealthy. Even with all that, it's looking like we may actually manage to pull off a relatively soft landing.

With all of that, I think it will be some time before we can accurately analyze what these events mean for economic policy.

> The previous administration also squandered a lot of debt on tax breaks for the ultra wealthy.

That's a nice sound bite but it's not true as the majority of the tax breaks went to the middle class:

https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/584190-irs-data-prove-tr...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/11/14/does-trum...

https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/26/politics/fact-check-sanders-t...

Even if the majority of the tax cuts went to the wealthy, there's nothing inherently wrong with the people who are paying the most taxes getting the most out of a tax cut. The other end of the income spectrum makes that immediately apparent. Would you expect every tax cut to directly pay money who don't pay any taxes at all?

Can we never lower taxes on people making more than some arbitrary income? Or do you mean that after some arbitrary income amount, it's never okay to ever get a tax cut?

> In what way? Enlighten us.

You can google as well as I can, and if you're well-versed enough to have a firm opinion about MMT (and no expansion of the acronym needed) then you do not need my handholding.

But anyway, I submit that the extra-ordinary claim would be the parties with the control of money supply and taxation structure, and the parties without it, are on an equal footing here when it comes to debt. Graeber has things to say on the topic. IDK, go ahead and make the case that they line up despite that.

As for "implying" - it really does serve political ends, I hear party leaders across the wide wide spectrum from Mr Sunak to Mr Starmer all use this same lazy analogy regarding austerity measures, it's not one or the other. Yeah, assumptions are bad, huh.

> I submit that the extra-ordinary claim would be the parties with the control of money supply and taxation structure, and the parties without it, are on an equal footing here when it comes to debt.

Well, obviously.

There’s limits to the parallels you can draw here, but unsustainable spending into debt is bad for both households and states. Period.

"unsustainable" is undefined and the rest is unproven. You cannot reason by analogy here.

It's economics, not hard science. "Proof" is a different standard.

What the US government is doing is unsustainable. The onus is on you if you want to argue otherwise, I already submitted a link that shows the problem with it.

If the US keeps going at this pace inflation will either get really bad, or taxes will get really high while spending gets slashed. Or some combination of all of it. Either way, it can't continue like this for long before things break in a bad way.

32T in debt is bad, but if nothing changes that could be >70T in a decade.

The economic growth is too slow to sustain that.

> debt is bad

You're just repeating your assumption. You have not shown that government debt and private debt are even the same thing at all. What if they're opposites? (hint: who is government debt owed too?). One more time, Graeber is good on this topic. https://positivemoney.org/2015/10/breaking-taboos-david-grae...

"saying "debt is bad, whoever's debt it is" is a bit like saying "that umpire's batting average is terrible, get them off the field". It's a fundamentally different game for them, argument that rests on the assumption that it works the same will go wrong rapidly.

I give up with you. If you want to argue that more debt is somehow not worse than less debt, that's like trying to argue that water is not wet.

> that's like trying to argue that water is not wet.

Your fallacy is assuming that both glasses contain water. Again you're just restating your assumptions as truth.

I refer you to my original parent comment; "Government debt and household debt don't work the same way." and "You have not shown that government debt and private debt are even the same thing at all"

What I am saying, and all that I am saying, is that they aren't the same thing, at all.

Saying "this is larger than that" is neither here nor there when they aren't comparable.

Saying "larger government debt must be bad because more household debt is bad" is not a valid argument. It might be good or bad, but not for those reasons. Argument that rests on the assumption that it works the same will go wrong rapidly.

> Future economic prospects for the US have never been so grim in living memory

Everything is cyclical, and no one truly expected the US to rise indefinitely. Perhaps we're past the peak now.

I do not see the need for the US to rise indefinitely. It just needs to stay the best option.

The best option.. for what? To live in? To invest in? To look at? Besides, isn't it incredibly personal? What's the best option for someone, might be a poor option for someone else.

The best option to invest in and do business in. If you want to make a deal, and are interested in consistent rule of law, and enforceability of the contracts and juridical outcomes, then you have an interest in doing it in the US.

This is in the context of the USD maintaining its relative value.