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

Neoliberal public choice continues to spin national taxation and several other forms of government intervention.

Peter Prince

2019-01-07 18:42:00 Monday ET

Neoliberal public choice continues to spin national taxation and several other forms of government intervention.

Neoliberal public choice continues to spin national taxation and several other forms of government intervention. The key post-crisis consensus focuses on go

+See More

Our proprietary alpha investment model outperforms most stock market indexes from 2017 to 2024.

Dan Rochefort

2024-02-04 08:28:00 Sunday ET

Our proprietary alpha investment model outperforms most stock market indexes from 2017 to 2024.

Our proprietary alpha investment model outperforms most stock market indexes from 2017 to 2024. Our proprietary alpha investment model outperforms the ma

+See More

Most major economies grow with great synchronicity several years after the global financial crisis.

John Fourier

2018-01-19 11:32:00 Friday ET

Most major economies grow with great synchronicity several years after the global financial crisis.

Most major economies grow with great synchronicity several years after the global financial crisis. These economies experience high stock market valuation,

+See More

Fed Chair Jerome Powell sees a remarkably positive outlook for the U.S. economy in early-October 2018.

Charlene Vos

2018-10-03 11:37:00 Wednesday ET

Fed Chair Jerome Powell sees a remarkably positive outlook for the U.S. economy in early-October 2018.

Fed Chair Jerome Powell sees a remarkably positive outlook for the U.S. economy right after the recent interest rate hike as of September 2018. He humbly su

+See More

What are the mainstream technological advances in the global auto industry?

Chanel Holden

2024-04-30 09:30:00 Tuesday ET

What are the mainstream technological advances in the global auto industry?

With clean and green energy resources and electric vehicles, the global auto industry now navigates at a newer and faster pace. Both BYD and Tesla have

+See More

Central banks learn to weigh the monetary policy trade-offs between output and inflation expectations and macro-financial stress conditions.

Becky Berkman

2026-01-31 10:31:00 Saturday ET

Central banks learn to weigh the monetary policy trade-offs between output and inflation expectations and macro-financial stress conditions.

  In recent years, several central banks conduct, assess, and discuss the core lessons, rules, and challenges from their monetary policy framework r

+See More