US fiscal profligacy may create a long-term debt sustainability problem:
http://www.ut.edu/uploadedFiles/Academics/Business/Economics/TBEFall2018.pdf
When Nations Don't Pay their Debts
https://www.richmondfed.org/-/media/richmondfedorg/publications/research/econ_focus/2018/q3/feature2.pdf
A Politics of Public Goods
When Nations Don't Pay their Debts
https://www.richmondfed.org/-/media/richmondfedorg/publications/research/econ_focus/2018/q3/feature2.pdf
A Politics of Public Goods
Eli Lehrer notes:
“Although federal
budgets have grown by trillions of dollars over the past half-century, one activity
of government has become steadily less substantial: the percentage of the
federal budget and the share of the national wealth spent on public goods. The
provision of things like clean air, national defense, basic scientific
research, and roads — things, in short, that benefit the great bulk of the
population through their very existence — has long been a core state function.
The shift in spending away from these goods and increasingly toward
social-insurance programs has correlated both with the growth of the state and
a decline in the respect Americans have for it.”
A debt crisis is coming. But don’t blame
entitlements