Everyone outside the White House is worried about the national debt, which is expected to accelerate from 100% of GDP today to nearly 200% over the next 30 years. But the standard forecast from the Congressional Budget Office is predicated on the assumption of 1.7% annual economic growth. But that’s way below the 3.2% average real growth rate of the U.S. economy from 1950-2005.
To borrow a phrase from JFK, when he was running for president in 1960: “We can do bettah.”
So what if we set a national priority to do everything humanly possible to make the economy grow at between 3 and 3.5%, not the anemic rate of growth CBO predicts? Many people think that’s impossible because of low birth rates and low labor force growth, but we can and should import the workers we need – especially the brainiacs – from the rest of the world to keep labor force growth from shrinking.
We can achieve bursts of growth from the next age of hyper-technological advances in areas like energy production, robotics, artificial intelligence, and gene therapy that could make the internet revolution look like a blip. New billion-dollar factories will be filled with very fewer workers and a lot of robots – which translates into gigantic leaps forward in productivity that could make 3% growth a layup.
Republicans are obsessed with plans to cut wasteful government spending and we are all for that. Most government subsidy programs are simply trillions of dollars of misallocated resources – i.e., the green energy debacle.
But we want PROSPERITY. This will make future generations of Americans much richer AND will erase deficits and eventually the debt as shown in the chart below from our economic advisory board member Louis Woodhill.