Is America Going Broke? An Ivy League Economist on Why Government Debt Is Surging

in economics •  2 years ago 

Even if the “Trump boom” continues, current tax and spending patterns indicate that deficits will continue rising, approaching $1 trillion in two years and steadily rising afterward, on and on into the future. On the current path, the outstanding public debt will rise by one third to $20 trillion just five years from now.

Source: Is America Going Broke? An Ivy League Economist on Why Government Debt Is Surging - Foundation for Economic Education

So what is the source of all this debt? Is it massive new military spending by Trump? Is it the Trump tax cuts? Nope... It's out of control unfunded entitlement spending. The fact of the matter is that other spending pales in comparison and the tax cuts are barely a drop in the bucket. Without changes the problem is going to very rapidly get larger. This is something that is going to have to be addressed in the not too distant future or we are all screwed.


The above article was written 4 years ago. It predicted a debt of $20 trillion in just 5 years. Now this article comes from a conservative/libertarian leaning site and if anything you might expect them to overestimate the debt (certainly if you are more liberal leaning you would probably be inclined to). But nope. Even they vastly underestimated it. In less than 5 years it is not $20 trillion but more than 50% higher than that at $31 trillion. That's more than $246,000 per taxpayer. While much of that debt still comes from unfunded entitlement spending, more and more of it seems to come in a form of complicated money laundering via foreign aid and "infrastructure" spending.

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