The President has a unique path to greatness not afforded to first term presidents. Since he is not eligible for another term, he can fix our debt problem by creating one big beautiful bill called Make America Fiscally Great again. He could in one bill raise taxes until some predetermined debt limit as a percent of GDP and mandate a balanced federal budget each year. I do not want to pay more taxes, but I want us to be fiscally responsible to ourselves and future generations more.
Workaround to avoid ordinary income treatment of short term gains? Great please tell me. And why is that ridiculous? If tax policy drove long term investment over ODTE options and shitco, memecoin flipping, would that be bad thing?
A lot of good ideas here. How about also-Carried Interest and a tiered cap gains tax structure that prioritizes long term investment- 75% tax on gains less than 1 yr, 40% 1-3, 25% 3-5 and 10% greater than 5 yrs. Then you could get rid of the step-up in basis on public securities, which is ridiculous.
While I agree with this in spirit, it means a lot of political anger in the near future. Truly balancing the budget or at least inching towards fiscal discipline means cutting Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. As a younger American, I broadly support curtailing benefits for the elderly because it is clearly bankrupting the nation and leaving nothing for future generations. But the elderly vote and they own the homes and they own most of the wealth in this nation. That's a tough hurdle to overcome. At the very least, I hope we can means test.
I do not agree that we need substantial cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security to deal with our budget issues, although I would support a single payor health system that would save 3-5% of GNP. We already tax SSA benefits and have much higher Medicare Part B and D premiums based on income. I would also not oppose slowly raising the age of Social Security benefits as life expectancy improves. What we do need is to revise the tax structure:
*Raise top income tax rates to 50% (that's what it was in 1980)
*Tax dividends at the same rate as wages. The capital gains tax is trickier because you are taxing inflation as well as real income
*Lower the estate tax and gift exemptions
*Properly fund the Internal Revenue Service
*Consider a 1% wealth tax
Unfortunately, our situation will have to get much worse before these things are considered.
Welcome to life. Working 30 -40 years can bring higher wealth. Unless you won the birth to rich parents lottery, we all had to work hard and grow our wealth.
Perhaps reducing Medicaid as it is jointly funded by the federal and state governments. However, social security and Medicare have their own funding tax streams. Fixing those programs for the long term, when you might want them, is a lot easier than getting a balanced budget. It was done 50 yrs ago without disastrous results and can be done again.
I'll push back on the work hard mantra because I see it way too much in older generations. Here are some uncomfortable facts:
- In 1980, 50% of the aged 25-35 were homeowners. Today it is 30%
- 1983 is the last year any reform was passed on SS--we have had an entire generation (boomers) of political "leadership" pass the buck and now fully expect their children to bail them out.
- In 1986, the FSA $5k deduction was passed without being pegged to inflation. If it tracked health and childcare inflation, it would be ~$30k today. If $5k of deductions saved $1k of taxes, $30k would translate to $6k. Our parents enjoyed a far better tax savings on this.
-Real costs of education have doubled while the college wage premium has flatlined since 2012.
-Prime age labor force participation rate (25-54) was 83.6% in Mar 2025 vs. an ATH of 84.5% in April 2000 yet the overall LFPR has declined from 67.3% in April 2000 to 62.6% today.
- In 2000, gov actuaries warned that SS funds would run dry around 2030...which has turned out to be quite accurate, yet nothing has been done.
So yes, we should work hard, but in fairness, today's world has greater structural headwinds against younger populations. They vote at higher rates than their grandparents did at similar ages, but their grandparents have such huge numbers that it does not matter. When I look at the policies from 1946-1983, I see a country that primarily built the world for growing families from Truman's mandated housing boom to SS reform. Today I see a lot of older folks refusing to recognize they are leaving a world with the cards truly stacked up against their grandchildren. I do not blame any individual boomer as many deeply wish to leave something for their family. But I think there are a lot of blind spots and there need to hard conversations on where the rubber meets the road. That means talking about reducing benefits from SS and Medicare and reforming zoning policies to reduce the price of housing. All of this will hit boomers.
Everyone needs understand that the U.S. government, which issues its own currency, does NOT face a solvency constraint. And the Federal Reserve has far far more power than any silly "bond vigilantes". That is not to say there are no consequences of excessive deficit spending. But the consequence is *inflation* (see the 9%-ish inflation rates as a result of COVID-era stimulus). Which is not to be trifled with.
Also, note that while MMT would agree with what I wrote above, there are other policy-oriented things that MMT gets wrong. I'm not an MMT person.
I would simply say that it is important to understand the machinery of the money system before making ill-considered pronouncements.
Everyone also needs to understand that ALL money is debt. There is no way for debt to go away in the aggregate. Overall debt increases when the economy expands, primarily through bank loans. if you look at Federal Reserve Data, you will see that the government sector, the household sector, and the corporate sector each have accumulated trillions of dollars in debt. If everyone is in debt, how does it get "paid back"?
One way out would be reform of the process for congressional expenditure. There’s no reason why we have to issue treasuries to distribute money beyond what we take in via taxes. We could just issue dollars directly. The treasury dance is a legacy of a pre-Bretton woods era when we weren’t fiscally sovereign.
We either make new dollars, or make new treasuries. The difference is that when we make new treasuries to fund our spending, that’s a commitment to issue even more dollars in the future to individuals/institutions who probably don’t need them (hedge funds, sovereign wealth funds, etc).
Sovereign currency issuers MAKE bonds and dollars. The only constraint on how many they can issue is how much inflation citizens are willing to tolerate; and that is mostly a function of real economic capacity.
All this talk of “raising revenues” for governments that make the credit instrument (currency) which they collect in repayment of the tax burdens they impose is endlessly amusing. Historically governments have just burned (literally, in flames) the tax revenue they collect.
This is always and everywhere only a question of how many dollars can be in circulation, and where.
Folks who advocate for this kind of view are well aware of the weimar/zimbabwe precedents and explain them as cases where severely constrained economic capacity insufficient to absorb additional stimulus was the problem, not the stimulus itself. The so-called “output gap” is a measure of this capacity.
Your argument has to be that we don’t have a large enough output gap to absorb more dollars. Most estimates of the output gap that I’ve seen put it at several trillion.
Output gap? We're at pretty close to full employment. Yes there's some decline in labor force participation but bringing them back would not be easy being a lot are in school, disabled or incarcerated. Where we are now is a question of raising productivity of existing workforce...or maybe increasing it through immigration.
Respectfully, I think your argument is about 12-15 years out of date. It made sense to call for more fiscal expansionary policy in 2010 but not now.
Good, then I think we disagree about the size of the output gap.
But I was a bit misleading there since my main point was just that there’s functionally little difference between large institutional investors swapping some M1 money to treasury in exchange for M3 money + future M1 vs treasury just issuing the M1 directly and sending to lockheed or whatever.
There are probably good reasons to keep the debt financing thing around, but it feels like any concern about increases in debt should just reduce to concerns about increases in the M3 supply. USG can make as much as it wants consistent with its inflation policy goals.
Number 1... there's no "output gap"...the US is on the same growth trajectory it was on prior to 2009 Great Recession and now pre pandemic.
Number 2...money creation is irrelevant because other limitations are present...number of workers, available land, raw materials. These are real world limits.
What we're stuck doing now is trying to get more production out of existing resources and flooding the economy with more liquidity doesn't address that.
As the saying goes, that which can't continue indefinitely... won't.
Trump was our last chance at getting our financial house in order (Harris certainly wasn't going to do it.) And the GOP, still hostage to zombie-Reaganism, is blowing it. Our political structures appear incapable of solving this. The incentives for the players are all wrong.
We're in for some VERY hard times ahead. The US will eventually get Liz Trussed by the bond market. When that happens, the decline in the dollar will be rapid (double-digit % drop within minutes or even seconds). The 25% of US debt held by foreigners will suddenly get a lot cheaper to service. But 2/3rds of our debt is held domestically, and those holder's std of living will decline significantly as imports become vastly more expensive. How the political leadership responds to this will largely control what happens next. I pray it happens under a Vance administration not a Trump one though. (Newsome or Pritzker might do well too given their experience governing near bankrupt states, but their bias for power centralization worries me.)
We're likely not headed for Venezuela. Something more akin to the UK post Suez, but accelerated to a few months instead of a decade+, seems pretty likely though.
I'm curious you're worried about power centralization when we have seen that writ large in executive powers for the past 40-50 years. Given Trump's musings on Fed independence and blasting SCOTUS on social media, I find it odd to leave those actions untouched. Why is it you're worried about Newsom or Priztker but not Trump regarding executive overreach?
1) Executive power consolidation is pretty antithetical to zombie-Reaganism that still hides within the GOP genome.
2) Trump himself shows little appetite for this. COVID provided an unprecedented opportunity to consolidate power but he made no attempt to do so. Fauci aside, the ground-level COVID response was a remarkable example of modern federalism.
I would much rather have a weaker Executive and a stronger Congress. But I don't see that in the cards for the same reason a balanced budget won't happen: the current dysfunctional system serves the interests of all its participants perfectly. That it poorly serves the long-term interests of voters or taxpayers or the nation as a whole makes little difference.
The reason I say I hope it happens during a Vance administration is because a crisis like a bond-market collapse requires steady leadership, a long-term time horizon, serious economic education, clear and cross-party communication ability, and consistent policies. Trump possesses none of these; Vance scores at least 3 1/2 out of 5. Newsome likely scores about 2 1/2 to 3, but his monarchical tendencies would be very dangerous under that kind of crisis. I live in CA; he really liked being King during COVID.
The sad truth is even if congress raised the marginal tax rates, I don't think it will have the intended affect. You have to take stocks out of the compensation packages. As we have seen you cannot tax stock. The rich have an entire system of taking loans based on portfolios to avoid taxes as a whole. Also make stock buybacks illegal again. None of this will happen in the current state of the government. Both parties are bought and paid for. The corporations and the robber barrons have bought the congress on both sides, the Supreme Court, and the presidency. Also make lobbying illegal. You should not he able to influence votes on a bill by buying the votes.
I worked on political staff at the state level (CA), and your characterization just doesn't match what I saw.
"Both parties are bought and paid for." I feel like this is less true today than it has been at any time in my lifetime. Partisan differences are more significant than I've ever seen them. For better or worse, the uni-party is dead.
"you should not b e able to influence a bill by buying votes"
This conflates 2 problems: lobbying and campaign finance.
Lobbying is hiring someone who can advocate your point of view better than you. You can lament this, but in a large republic, I don't think there's much you can can do about it. Former Congress-critters and staffers connections are valuable. Outlawing it won't help; the benefits will just get hidden better. I'd rather have registered lobbyists than under-the-table ones.
Campaign finance is a different problem. People rewarding candidates who vote the way they want is the essence of democracy. When that crossed to candidates voting a particular way BECAUSE of the rewards is more nebulous than many people realize.
I can give you an example.: This was 30 years ago. I was at a campaign event with a CA Assembly candidate I was working for. He was talking to someone (a lobbyist as I remember) about a particular bill. After their discussion, the lobbyist said, "OK, could you turn around now? Just turn all the way around." My candidate was uncertain, but he was young, so he obliged and as he came back around, the lobbyist said, "Mr. Assemblyman, I'd like to talk to you about contributing to your campaign."
We talked about this exchange back at the office that night. It left a really bad taste in my candidate's mouth. He was a lawyer, but he wasn't concerned about the legality; it just felt wrong. I told him I thought it was wrong. And he and I agreed that we should return this man's contribution.
Do all candidates behave this way all the time? No. Of course not. There are unethical people in every profession, especially among lawyers, who are overrepresented in elected circles. But I saw similar behavior -- candidates behaving in ways directly opposed to their campaign's financial interests -- many times.
The root problem, of course, is that apart from a flat tax or a national sales tax, policy makers haven't a clue how to raise the necessary revenues to balance the budget, let alone reduce the outstanding national debt.
In theory at least there is a way to meet the challenge that does not substantially reduce the progressivity of the overall tax system. Implementation, however, would require extraordinary statesmanship; which is to say, it would require the cooperation of all OECD countries to put an end shell corporations and unregistered bank and brokerage accounts in overseas tax havens. https://shorturl.at/kR74X
And, as during your interview with Tudker, you refuse to discuss Hamilton's view that you must grow/produce your way out of debt. It's not about cutting, it's about putting credit to work building the power of production in your workforce. That's what Trump is doing by recruiting investors. In the meantime you don't make the people who elected you pay for the ruin our economy is in. (the which is the direction of the budget cutters) Growing the economy is increasing the physical output per worker through the means of the best science and technology.
We will certainly have to reorganize our debt; convert it from short term to long term,, but we will pay it, just as we did the Revolutionary War Debt. Not by killing people with cuts in Medicaid.
It’s comical if not tragic that the GOP, the “fiscal conservatives” are completely screwing the American Public and helping Billionaires. The fact they stand up and defend it is even better!!! They have a chance to “fix it” and they are choosing not to. It’s so Disgusting.
Arguing is denying reality. We can increase the upper rates, or tax corporations, or establish a VAT, but somehow we have to pay for things. We also have way too many poor people. People who earn a decent wage pay taxes, paying people peanuts makes them dependent on Medicaid, food stamps, and section 8 housing.
It's long past time to triple the min wage, and tax ourselves to such an extent that we never ever have deficits again. We should eliminate all most all of our debt.
"If ever there were a hard choice with huge political upside that requires only a willingness to abandon outdated orthodoxy, a more balanced tax package would seem to be it. And if ever there were a political figure who relished such choices…" Tax Increases on the wealthy enjoy 80% popular support. Oren is suggesting Trump could gain some political capital by demanding what enjoys popular support in his Big Beautiful Bill. But Trump actually promised that campaigning in his first go 'round. He said his tax policies were going to hurt him personally but were good for the country. We got something rather different than his promise.
The no tax republicans are not representing their constituents, broadly speaking. Their "philosophy" is divorced from reality. Grinding poor people into the dirt, poor people including especially, grammaw, isn't popular. I'll mention again, taxing the wealthy enjoys robust popular support. The opposite of what they propose.
So, Oren, just say it. Logic dictates it. The premise has to include that the social spending we currently have cannot and should not be reduced and should and could be made more efficient by introducing medicare for all. The premise also has to include aggressively reducing the federal debt service. Allowing that to go on is beyond irresponsible approaching criminal. The Only answer available that also includes political stability without violence is radically increasing taxes on the wealthy, meaning in the $400k and above region. And that should be done in a radically progressive marginal increase way.
Will Trump do that? Of course not. Trump doesn't reduce Trump's own wealth for any reason whatsoever. It's painful to watch Oren's optimism for Trump get continually dragged on concrete. Oren has some of the right instincts on policy despite trying to cram them into a "conservative" box. This administration is in No Way conservative. (I've said several times before that as an economic progressive I can have a good conversation with a true Burkean Conservative). Trump is in no way benevolent, he is only and strictly self-serving. The sooner Oren folds that fact into his model of the world the better his critiques and prescriptions and strategy will be.
I had thought Bessent, being a Rubin protege, would not have a theological attachment to tax cuts. But he sure has not made the case for them other than the standard magical assumption that *extending* TCJA will push growth rates up to 3% whereas merely enacting TCJA in the first place maintained growth at a middling 1.7% clip.
Is there a longer game he's playing? An alternative strategy? I'm not seeing it.
This illustrates why career politicians are so damaging: their number one priority is to stay in power; the country be damned. It seems pretty obvious that if we are ever going to get out of this bipartisan mess tax collection must go up and spending must go down.
Who knew? The self-proclaimed "king of debt" is on pace to break his all time record set in his first term. Shocking:) It's as if people thought he had an actual plan. When will people acknowledge the obvious, Don cares not a whit about policy, he's been on every side of every major issue (except tariffs and an aversion to brown people). Like Elon , RFK Jr, Tulsi et al, he was recently a Democrat-he can be for or against anything. Then there is his string of failed, bankrupt businesses, from which he was saved only by his starring role as a game show personality. Don cares first about enriching Don. Read about the meme coin corruption, and you'll learn all you need to know about Dons priorities. It puts the 747 caper to shame. $TRUMP coin anyone?
The President has a unique path to greatness not afforded to first term presidents. Since he is not eligible for another term, he can fix our debt problem by creating one big beautiful bill called Make America Fiscally Great again. He could in one bill raise taxes until some predetermined debt limit as a percent of GDP and mandate a balanced federal budget each year. I do not want to pay more taxes, but I want us to be fiscally responsible to ourselves and future generations more.
Workaround to avoid ordinary income treatment of short term gains? Great please tell me. And why is that ridiculous? If tax policy drove long term investment over ODTE options and shitco, memecoin flipping, would that be bad thing?
A lot of good ideas here. How about also-Carried Interest and a tiered cap gains tax structure that prioritizes long term investment- 75% tax on gains less than 1 yr, 40% 1-3, 25% 3-5 and 10% greater than 5 yrs. Then you could get rid of the step-up in basis on public securities, which is ridiculous.
75% on gains less than a year? How did you come up with that ridiculousness. You know there is a work around for that already, right?
While I agree with this in spirit, it means a lot of political anger in the near future. Truly balancing the budget or at least inching towards fiscal discipline means cutting Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. As a younger American, I broadly support curtailing benefits for the elderly because it is clearly bankrupting the nation and leaving nothing for future generations. But the elderly vote and they own the homes and they own most of the wealth in this nation. That's a tough hurdle to overcome. At the very least, I hope we can means test.
I do not agree that we need substantial cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security to deal with our budget issues, although I would support a single payor health system that would save 3-5% of GNP. We already tax SSA benefits and have much higher Medicare Part B and D premiums based on income. I would also not oppose slowly raising the age of Social Security benefits as life expectancy improves. What we do need is to revise the tax structure:
*Raise top income tax rates to 50% (that's what it was in 1980)
*Tax dividends at the same rate as wages. The capital gains tax is trickier because you are taxing inflation as well as real income
*Lower the estate tax and gift exemptions
*Properly fund the Internal Revenue Service
*Consider a 1% wealth tax
Unfortunately, our situation will have to get much worse before these things are considered.
Welcome to life. Working 30 -40 years can bring higher wealth. Unless you won the birth to rich parents lottery, we all had to work hard and grow our wealth.
Perhaps reducing Medicaid as it is jointly funded by the federal and state governments. However, social security and Medicare have their own funding tax streams. Fixing those programs for the long term, when you might want them, is a lot easier than getting a balanced budget. It was done 50 yrs ago without disastrous results and can be done again.
I'll push back on the work hard mantra because I see it way too much in older generations. Here are some uncomfortable facts:
- In 1980, 50% of the aged 25-35 were homeowners. Today it is 30%
- 1983 is the last year any reform was passed on SS--we have had an entire generation (boomers) of political "leadership" pass the buck and now fully expect their children to bail them out.
- In 1986, the FSA $5k deduction was passed without being pegged to inflation. If it tracked health and childcare inflation, it would be ~$30k today. If $5k of deductions saved $1k of taxes, $30k would translate to $6k. Our parents enjoyed a far better tax savings on this.
-Real costs of education have doubled while the college wage premium has flatlined since 2012.
-Prime age labor force participation rate (25-54) was 83.6% in Mar 2025 vs. an ATH of 84.5% in April 2000 yet the overall LFPR has declined from 67.3% in April 2000 to 62.6% today.
- In 2000, gov actuaries warned that SS funds would run dry around 2030...which has turned out to be quite accurate, yet nothing has been done.
So yes, we should work hard, but in fairness, today's world has greater structural headwinds against younger populations. They vote at higher rates than their grandparents did at similar ages, but their grandparents have such huge numbers that it does not matter. When I look at the policies from 1946-1983, I see a country that primarily built the world for growing families from Truman's mandated housing boom to SS reform. Today I see a lot of older folks refusing to recognize they are leaving a world with the cards truly stacked up against their grandchildren. I do not blame any individual boomer as many deeply wish to leave something for their family. But I think there are a lot of blind spots and there need to hard conversations on where the rubber meets the road. That means talking about reducing benefits from SS and Medicare and reforming zoning policies to reduce the price of housing. All of this will hit boomers.
A lot of words that seemingly say Conservatives/Republicans aren’t very good at fiscal policy.
Everyone needs understand that the U.S. government, which issues its own currency, does NOT face a solvency constraint. And the Federal Reserve has far far more power than any silly "bond vigilantes". That is not to say there are no consequences of excessive deficit spending. But the consequence is *inflation* (see the 9%-ish inflation rates as a result of COVID-era stimulus). Which is not to be trifled with.
Also, note that while MMT would agree with what I wrote above, there are other policy-oriented things that MMT gets wrong. I'm not an MMT person.
I would simply say that it is important to understand the machinery of the money system before making ill-considered pronouncements.
Everyone also needs to understand that ALL money is debt. There is no way for debt to go away in the aggregate. Overall debt increases when the economy expands, primarily through bank loans. if you look at Federal Reserve Data, you will see that the government sector, the household sector, and the corporate sector each have accumulated trillions of dollars in debt. If everyone is in debt, how does it get "paid back"?
Great summary of the trilemma.
One way out would be reform of the process for congressional expenditure. There’s no reason why we have to issue treasuries to distribute money beyond what we take in via taxes. We could just issue dollars directly. The treasury dance is a legacy of a pre-Bretton woods era when we weren’t fiscally sovereign.
We either make new dollars, or make new treasuries. The difference is that when we make new treasuries to fund our spending, that’s a commitment to issue even more dollars in the future to individuals/institutions who probably don’t need them (hedge funds, sovereign wealth funds, etc).
Sovereign currency issuers MAKE bonds and dollars. The only constraint on how many they can issue is how much inflation citizens are willing to tolerate; and that is mostly a function of real economic capacity.
All this talk of “raising revenues” for governments that make the credit instrument (currency) which they collect in repayment of the tax burdens they impose is endlessly amusing. Historically governments have just burned (literally, in flames) the tax revenue they collect.
This is always and everywhere only a question of how many dollars can be in circulation, and where.
Well, we don't want runaway inflation do we?.
I’m sorry, but what’s the argument?
Folks who advocate for this kind of view are well aware of the weimar/zimbabwe precedents and explain them as cases where severely constrained economic capacity insufficient to absorb additional stimulus was the problem, not the stimulus itself. The so-called “output gap” is a measure of this capacity.
Your argument has to be that we don’t have a large enough output gap to absorb more dollars. Most estimates of the output gap that I’ve seen put it at several trillion.
Output gap? We're at pretty close to full employment. Yes there's some decline in labor force participation but bringing them back would not be easy being a lot are in school, disabled or incarcerated. Where we are now is a question of raising productivity of existing workforce...or maybe increasing it through immigration.
Respectfully, I think your argument is about 12-15 years out of date. It made sense to call for more fiscal expansionary policy in 2010 but not now.
Good, then I think we disagree about the size of the output gap.
But I was a bit misleading there since my main point was just that there’s functionally little difference between large institutional investors swapping some M1 money to treasury in exchange for M3 money + future M1 vs treasury just issuing the M1 directly and sending to lockheed or whatever.
There are probably good reasons to keep the debt financing thing around, but it feels like any concern about increases in debt should just reduce to concerns about increases in the M3 supply. USG can make as much as it wants consistent with its inflation policy goals.
Number 1... there's no "output gap"...the US is on the same growth trajectory it was on prior to 2009 Great Recession and now pre pandemic.
Number 2...money creation is irrelevant because other limitations are present...number of workers, available land, raw materials. These are real world limits.
What we're stuck doing now is trying to get more production out of existing resources and flooding the economy with more liquidity doesn't address that.
Number 3: MMT is nonsense
As the saying goes, that which can't continue indefinitely... won't.
Trump was our last chance at getting our financial house in order (Harris certainly wasn't going to do it.) And the GOP, still hostage to zombie-Reaganism, is blowing it. Our political structures appear incapable of solving this. The incentives for the players are all wrong.
We're in for some VERY hard times ahead. The US will eventually get Liz Trussed by the bond market. When that happens, the decline in the dollar will be rapid (double-digit % drop within minutes or even seconds). The 25% of US debt held by foreigners will suddenly get a lot cheaper to service. But 2/3rds of our debt is held domestically, and those holder's std of living will decline significantly as imports become vastly more expensive. How the political leadership responds to this will largely control what happens next. I pray it happens under a Vance administration not a Trump one though. (Newsome or Pritzker might do well too given their experience governing near bankrupt states, but their bias for power centralization worries me.)
We're likely not headed for Venezuela. Something more akin to the UK post Suez, but accelerated to a few months instead of a decade+, seems pretty likely though.
I'm curious you're worried about power centralization when we have seen that writ large in executive powers for the past 40-50 years. Given Trump's musings on Fed independence and blasting SCOTUS on social media, I find it odd to leave those actions untouched. Why is it you're worried about Newsom or Priztker but not Trump regarding executive overreach?
Really 2 reasons:
1) Executive power consolidation is pretty antithetical to zombie-Reaganism that still hides within the GOP genome.
2) Trump himself shows little appetite for this. COVID provided an unprecedented opportunity to consolidate power but he made no attempt to do so. Fauci aside, the ground-level COVID response was a remarkable example of modern federalism.
I would much rather have a weaker Executive and a stronger Congress. But I don't see that in the cards for the same reason a balanced budget won't happen: the current dysfunctional system serves the interests of all its participants perfectly. That it poorly serves the long-term interests of voters or taxpayers or the nation as a whole makes little difference.
The reason I say I hope it happens during a Vance administration is because a crisis like a bond-market collapse requires steady leadership, a long-term time horizon, serious economic education, clear and cross-party communication ability, and consistent policies. Trump possesses none of these; Vance scores at least 3 1/2 out of 5. Newsome likely scores about 2 1/2 to 3, but his monarchical tendencies would be very dangerous under that kind of crisis. I live in CA; he really liked being King during COVID.
Classic cycling majority, unstable structure maried by internal conflict and crossed purposes and policies.
The sad truth is even if congress raised the marginal tax rates, I don't think it will have the intended affect. You have to take stocks out of the compensation packages. As we have seen you cannot tax stock. The rich have an entire system of taking loans based on portfolios to avoid taxes as a whole. Also make stock buybacks illegal again. None of this will happen in the current state of the government. Both parties are bought and paid for. The corporations and the robber barrons have bought the congress on both sides, the Supreme Court, and the presidency. Also make lobbying illegal. You should not he able to influence votes on a bill by buying the votes.
I worked on political staff at the state level (CA), and your characterization just doesn't match what I saw.
"Both parties are bought and paid for." I feel like this is less true today than it has been at any time in my lifetime. Partisan differences are more significant than I've ever seen them. For better or worse, the uni-party is dead.
"you should not b e able to influence a bill by buying votes"
This conflates 2 problems: lobbying and campaign finance.
Lobbying is hiring someone who can advocate your point of view better than you. You can lament this, but in a large republic, I don't think there's much you can can do about it. Former Congress-critters and staffers connections are valuable. Outlawing it won't help; the benefits will just get hidden better. I'd rather have registered lobbyists than under-the-table ones.
Campaign finance is a different problem. People rewarding candidates who vote the way they want is the essence of democracy. When that crossed to candidates voting a particular way BECAUSE of the rewards is more nebulous than many people realize.
I can give you an example.: This was 30 years ago. I was at a campaign event with a CA Assembly candidate I was working for. He was talking to someone (a lobbyist as I remember) about a particular bill. After their discussion, the lobbyist said, "OK, could you turn around now? Just turn all the way around." My candidate was uncertain, but he was young, so he obliged and as he came back around, the lobbyist said, "Mr. Assemblyman, I'd like to talk to you about contributing to your campaign."
We talked about this exchange back at the office that night. It left a really bad taste in my candidate's mouth. He was a lawyer, but he wasn't concerned about the legality; it just felt wrong. I told him I thought it was wrong. And he and I agreed that we should return this man's contribution.
Do all candidates behave this way all the time? No. Of course not. There are unethical people in every profession, especially among lawyers, who are overrepresented in elected circles. But I saw similar behavior -- candidates behaving in ways directly opposed to their campaign's financial interests -- many times.
The root problem, of course, is that apart from a flat tax or a national sales tax, policy makers haven't a clue how to raise the necessary revenues to balance the budget, let alone reduce the outstanding national debt.
In theory at least there is a way to meet the challenge that does not substantially reduce the progressivity of the overall tax system. Implementation, however, would require extraordinary statesmanship; which is to say, it would require the cooperation of all OECD countries to put an end shell corporations and unregistered bank and brokerage accounts in overseas tax havens. https://shorturl.at/kR74X
Sadly, this makes a lot of sense. Sadly, because I usually disagree with you, almost always, in fact. I’m even agreeing with Rand Paul, these days…
And, as during your interview with Tudker, you refuse to discuss Hamilton's view that you must grow/produce your way out of debt. It's not about cutting, it's about putting credit to work building the power of production in your workforce. That's what Trump is doing by recruiting investors. In the meantime you don't make the people who elected you pay for the ruin our economy is in. (the which is the direction of the budget cutters) Growing the economy is increasing the physical output per worker through the means of the best science and technology.
We will certainly have to reorganize our debt; convert it from short term to long term,, but we will pay it, just as we did the Revolutionary War Debt. Not by killing people with cuts in Medicaid.
It’s comical if not tragic that the GOP, the “fiscal conservatives” are completely screwing the American Public and helping Billionaires. The fact they stand up and defend it is even better!!! They have a chance to “fix it” and they are choosing not to. It’s so Disgusting.
Arguing is denying reality. We can increase the upper rates, or tax corporations, or establish a VAT, but somehow we have to pay for things. We also have way too many poor people. People who earn a decent wage pay taxes, paying people peanuts makes them dependent on Medicaid, food stamps, and section 8 housing.
It's long past time to triple the min wage, and tax ourselves to such an extent that we never ever have deficits again. We should eliminate all most all of our debt.
"If ever there were a hard choice with huge political upside that requires only a willingness to abandon outdated orthodoxy, a more balanced tax package would seem to be it. And if ever there were a political figure who relished such choices…" Tax Increases on the wealthy enjoy 80% popular support. Oren is suggesting Trump could gain some political capital by demanding what enjoys popular support in his Big Beautiful Bill. But Trump actually promised that campaigning in his first go 'round. He said his tax policies were going to hurt him personally but were good for the country. We got something rather different than his promise.
The no tax republicans are not representing their constituents, broadly speaking. Their "philosophy" is divorced from reality. Grinding poor people into the dirt, poor people including especially, grammaw, isn't popular. I'll mention again, taxing the wealthy enjoys robust popular support. The opposite of what they propose.
So, Oren, just say it. Logic dictates it. The premise has to include that the social spending we currently have cannot and should not be reduced and should and could be made more efficient by introducing medicare for all. The premise also has to include aggressively reducing the federal debt service. Allowing that to go on is beyond irresponsible approaching criminal. The Only answer available that also includes political stability without violence is radically increasing taxes on the wealthy, meaning in the $400k and above region. And that should be done in a radically progressive marginal increase way.
Will Trump do that? Of course not. Trump doesn't reduce Trump's own wealth for any reason whatsoever. It's painful to watch Oren's optimism for Trump get continually dragged on concrete. Oren has some of the right instincts on policy despite trying to cram them into a "conservative" box. This administration is in No Way conservative. (I've said several times before that as an economic progressive I can have a good conversation with a true Burkean Conservative). Trump is in no way benevolent, he is only and strictly self-serving. The sooner Oren folds that fact into his model of the world the better his critiques and prescriptions and strategy will be.
I had thought Bessent, being a Rubin protege, would not have a theological attachment to tax cuts. But he sure has not made the case for them other than the standard magical assumption that *extending* TCJA will push growth rates up to 3% whereas merely enacting TCJA in the first place maintained growth at a middling 1.7% clip.
Is there a longer game he's playing? An alternative strategy? I'm not seeing it.
This illustrates why career politicians are so damaging: their number one priority is to stay in power; the country be damned. It seems pretty obvious that if we are ever going to get out of this bipartisan mess tax collection must go up and spending must go down.
Who knew? The self-proclaimed "king of debt" is on pace to break his all time record set in his first term. Shocking:) It's as if people thought he had an actual plan. When will people acknowledge the obvious, Don cares not a whit about policy, he's been on every side of every major issue (except tariffs and an aversion to brown people). Like Elon , RFK Jr, Tulsi et al, he was recently a Democrat-he can be for or against anything. Then there is his string of failed, bankrupt businesses, from which he was saved only by his starring role as a game show personality. Don cares first about enriching Don. Read about the meme coin corruption, and you'll learn all you need to know about Dons priorities. It puts the 747 caper to shame. $TRUMP coin anyone?