We either need massive cuts in mandatory spending (fundamental changes to social contract) or increased revenue (politically not viable).
There's also near zero evidence we actually need a balanced budget for a healthy economy.
I don't think this is really supportable. Obviously one can appeal to the practically endless examples of countries that destroyed their own economies with debt. Of course the obvious argument to this is that this hasn't happened to the US. But there were extremely unique, and liminal, circumstances that explain this, that a search on "exporting inflation" [1] can largely explain. And those days are mostly behind us.
We can see this playing out in practice. Current interest payments on the debt are now $1.1 trillion per year. They've grown exponentially, far faster than the debt has. [2] The reason for this is that we can't just handwave away inflation so easily anymore, so we're now experiencing more like what would happen to other countries that let their money printers get a bit too excited. The Fed is keeping rates high in hopes of bringing inflation down, but it's just not really working. What this means is that when the government sells treasuries (which is how they 'print money') they need to offer ever higher interest rates. Notably even 20 year treasuries right now are offering yields of about 5%, so it seems most are not enthusiastic about things getting much better.
I think we're well on our way to becoming another of history's cautionary tales that the next great power will also certainly think doesn't apply to them, because if something hasn't exploded in 50 years, that must mean it'll never explode.
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The alternative is to pay an ever increasing amount of interest on our ever increasing debt.
The other alternative is to default on our debt obligations.
Neither option is good.
Is that really true? Seems like its just an issue of how you frame it.
It makes it clear that the fundamental issue is not government revenue, but government spending. Every single time you give the government $1 they find a reason to spend $1.05. Why would you expect this to change if you give them $1.05, instead of them now just finding a reason to spend $1.10?
I think that democracies are probably just fundamentally incapable of caring about long-term problems like debt when acting irresponsibly has substantial short-term benefits. It's almost like some spin on a tragedy of the commons.
These three words are doing quite a lot of heavy lifting.