The last few years have disproven this idea that we need to stop with debt spending. We just conducted a beautiful experiment: since 2020 the USA has had more deficit spending, more economic growth, and less inflation, than the EU, which has had less deficit spending, less growth, and more inflation.

A government without debt would be like a business without debt: obviously wasting good opportunities, instead of pursuing them aggressively.

But even that analogy is wrong, since a business has to make money to pay its debts, so a business does face some ultimate limit on how much debt it can take on. By contrast, the USA faces no such limit. We can always print as much money as we need to pay any debt. So long as we're willing to deal with the inflation, we can print as much money as we need.

But realistically, with birth rates falling, the government will have to engage in more and more stimulus spending as time goes by. We used to be able to rely on population growth to be the real engine of the economy, but we no longer have that. So to keep the economy going in the future, we will have to rely on immigration and deficit spending. And there, too, the EU offers an important counter-point: the USA has had a much easier time integrating immigrants, in part because of our deficit spending. By contrast, the EU is seeing how difficult it is to integrate immigrants in a climate of austerity. The EU is close to stalling, in that it needs immigrants to prop up economic growth but it is not printing enough money to put the immigrants to work -- a stall which could lead to a vicious downward cycle. Meanwhile the USA has pulled in millions of immigrants and also printed enough money to put them to work, resulting in strong economic growth.