The U.S. federal government debt has risen from less than 40% of total GDP about a decade ago to 78% as of May 2018.

John Fourier

2018-06-01 07:30:00 Fri ET

The U.S. federal government debt has risen from less than 40% of total GDP about a decade ago to 78% as of May 2018. The Congressional Budget Office predicts that this ratio will surge to 96% in 2028. Although many blame the Trump tax cuts as the key root cause, the increases in health care and retirement benefits suggest a different real reason for U.S. deficit severity.

Harvard professor Martin Feldstein attributes the recent rise of U.S. budget deficit from 4% to 5% of total GDP to increases in Medicare and social security retirement benefits for middle-class older Americans. These increases in core health care and retirement benefits account for about 2.7% of total GDP. The neoclassical Sargent-Wallace thesis suggests that the central bank cannot finance incessant increases in core deficits with government bond issuance regardless of money supply growth. This money supply expansion would lead to inexorable inflationary pressures that defeat the dual mandate of both maximum employment and price stability in the suboptimal fiscal-monetary policy coordination. Inflation serves as a seigniorage tax that would in turn dampen real macroeconomic variates such as household consumption, capital investment, labor supply, and total economic output. In light of this ripple effect on sustainable financial market growth and prosperity, the law of inadvertent consequences counsels caution.

 


If any of our AYA Analytica financial health memos (FHM), blog posts, ebooks, newsletters, and notifications etc, or any other form of online content curation, involves potential copyright concerns, please feel free to contact us at service@ayafintech.network so that we can remove relevant content in response to any such request within a reasonable time frame.

Blog+More

Mario Draghi declares the ECB agreement on a thorny set of revisions to Basel 3.

Rose Prince

2017-11-25 06:34:00 Saturday ET

Mario Draghi declares the ECB agreement on a thorny set of revisions to Basel 3.

Mario Draghi, President of the European Central Bank, heads the international committee of financial supervisors and has declared their landmark agreement o

+See More

Foreign majority owners offer Sprint and T-Mobile to stop using HuaWei critical technologies after the U.S. telecom merger.

Daphne Basel

2018-12-20 13:40:00 Thursday ET

Foreign majority owners offer Sprint and T-Mobile to stop using HuaWei critical technologies after the U.S. telecom merger.

T-Mobile and Sprint indicate that the U.S. is likely to approve their merger plan as they take the offer from foreign owners to stop using HuaWei telecom te

+See More

Top 4 U.S. richest people are self-made billionaires: Gates, Buffet, Bloomberg, and Zuckerberg.

Dan Rochefort

2017-08-01 09:40:00 Tuesday ET

Top 4 U.S. richest people are self-made billionaires: Gates, Buffet, Bloomberg, and Zuckerberg.

In American states, all of the Top 4 richest people are self-made billionaires: Bill Gates in Washington, Warren Buffett in Nebraska, Michael Bloomberg in N

+See More

Trump administration imposes 20%-50% tariffs on Turkish imports due to a recent spat over the detention of an American pastor.

Apple Boston

2018-08-11 14:35:00 Saturday ET

Trump administration imposes 20%-50% tariffs on Turkish imports due to a recent spat over the detention of an American pastor.

The Trump administration imposes 20%-50% tariffs on Turkish imports due to a recent spat over the detention of an American pastor, Andrew Brunson, in Turkey

+See More

President Trump tweets his key decision to oust State Secretary Rex Tillerson due to intense disagreement over diplomatic affairs.

Fiona Sydney

2018-03-07 07:34:00 Wednesday ET

President Trump tweets his key decision to oust State Secretary Rex Tillerson due to intense disagreement over diplomatic affairs.

President Trump tweets his key decision to oust State Secretary Rex Tillerson after several months of intense disagreement over diplomatic affairs. Trump so

+See More

Daniel Goleman explains why emotional intelligence is more important than high IQ for our success, virtue, and happiness in life.

Olivia London

2025-06-21 10:25:00 Saturday ET

Daniel Goleman explains why emotional intelligence is more important than high IQ for our success, virtue, and happiness in life.

Former New York Times science author and Harvard psychologist Daniel Goleman explains why emotional intelligence can serve as a more important critical succ

+See More