Brian Riedl is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, focusing on budget, tax, and economic policy. His previous jobs include chief economist to Senator Rob Portman (R-OH), and positions on the Marco Rubio and Mitt Romney presidential campaigns.
Richard can you make any suggestions-- book recommendations, anything-- for how millennials and zoomers can practically prepare and protect ourselves financially from Americas impending Afro-gerontocratic socialist hellscape?
Shifting safety net spending -- SS, Medicare. Medicaid, UI, and the eventual RCTC to a VAT funding instead of funding them with wage taxes or general revenues -- would solve most of the deficit/future funding problem.
While Riedl seems to be right, the biggest issue with those predicting impending fiscal doom, who tend to be pro-market, is that markets don’t seem to agree. Bond markets don’t suggest anticipated high inflation; long term investment doesn’t suggest an anticipated collapse in rGDP, which one would expect from dramatic tax increases. Maybe the market expects we’ll grow our way out of this with AI? So I would love to ask Riedl, are markets just wrong/‘short-term-ist’ here? Or how can one reconcile his dire predictions with the lack of market pessimism?
This is very good. I appreciate this interview Richard and consider it one of your most important ones.
Richard can you make any suggestions-- book recommendations, anything-- for how millennials and zoomers can practically prepare and protect ourselves financially from Americas impending Afro-gerontocratic socialist hellscape?
Shifting safety net spending -- SS, Medicare. Medicaid, UI, and the eventual RCTC to a VAT funding instead of funding them with wage taxes or general revenues -- would solve most of the deficit/future funding problem.
While Riedl seems to be right, the biggest issue with those predicting impending fiscal doom, who tend to be pro-market, is that markets don’t seem to agree. Bond markets don’t suggest anticipated high inflation; long term investment doesn’t suggest an anticipated collapse in rGDP, which one would expect from dramatic tax increases. Maybe the market expects we’ll grow our way out of this with AI? So I would love to ask Riedl, are markets just wrong/‘short-term-ist’ here? Or how can one reconcile his dire predictions with the lack of market pessimism?
Brian Riedl here - I wrote on markets and interest rates at length here - https://manhattan.institute/article/how-higher-interest-rates-could-push-washington-toward-a-federal-debt-crisis
The summary to your question
1) Markets have been spectacularly wrong about inflation and interest rates for decades (report has many examples).
2) Interest rates have failed to predict virtually every financial crisis across the globe.
3) If you talk to bond market experts, the complacency stems from a (naive) assumption that Congress will take drastic action to curb deficits.
4) That assumption is cracking, which is driving rates up.
A tax increase that decreased deficits would be growth enhancing.
I see...tax your way to prosperity.
So, more austerity, more war, and more empire, then?
You forgot the gigachad image.