We do have the name of one politician who balanced the New York City budget though. Its probably not going to please a lot of people to hear that guy's name though. But that's what people want, right? Balanced budgets?

But no. That's not what people want and we all know it.

Conservatives gave up on principles long ago and have settled for simply lying about everything, including what's happening and who's responsible for it.

Humans are designed to operate in smallish clans with benevolent dictators whose right to rule is based on social currency with people they personally know. Anything else is a house of cards on unstable foundation.

I'm not sure how you fix that, but democracy so far has maybe been the least bad patch.

I think Clinton was the last us president to balance the budget and start reducing the deficit so I guess see what he did.

I wish you luck. Endless promises and short term thinking are the main things the system incentivizes. Each politician is temporarily renting their seat, paid for by other people. Each bureaucrat is studiously, steadfastly avoiding learning anything that threatens their continued employment, which is paid for by other people.

Just seems like one of those weird ambiguities.

Maybe we should consider the possibility that there is no such candidate, or if there is, they cannot compete against the 'populists'. What then?

    +-------------------------+----------------------------------------+
    | President Name          | Deficit Increase (+) or Decrease (-)   |
    +-------------------------+----------------------------------------+
    | Donald Trump (2nd term) |                                    N/A |
    | Donald Trump (1st term) |                                 +11.1% |
    | George W. Bush          |                                  +4.3% |
    | George H. W. Bush       |                                  +1.8% |
    | Ronald Reagan           |                                  +0.5% |
    | Gerald Ford             |                                  +0.8% |
    | Richard Nixon           |                                  +0.7% |
    | Dwight D. Eisenhower    |                                  -1.8% |
    +-------------------------+----------------------------------------+

    +-------------------------+----------------------------------------+
    | President Name          | Deficit Increase (+) or Decrease (-)   |
    +-------------------------+----------------------------------------+
    | Joe Biden               |                                  -5.7% |
    | Barack Obama            |                                  -6.7% |
    | Bill Clinton            |                                  -6.1% |
    | Jimmy Carter            |                                  -0.1% |
    | Lyndon B. Johnson       |                                  +1.9% |
    +-------------------------+----------------------------------------+

You could very easily force congress to balance the budget (both parties and the media have complained endlessly about this for exactly no good reason). You could also freeze spending at current levels and force congress to do it's job: allocate our limited resources most productively.

Hard to get re elected doing the right thing, but maybe we just need a throw away set of leaders to do the hard work?

This is an amazing use of the "in fact" trope, in exactly the same misleading way[1]. I talked about debt, and you casually shifted to servicing costs which presumes that rates stay historically low...when they're actually rapidly rising. Comical.

In the 1980s, the debt to GDP ratio was less than half what it currently is. Rates were higher, making the debt a crisis level then, but maybe you haven't noticed...rates are going up. Indeed, right now the rates were historically low, and anyone with functioning grey matter saw what was coming.

The US has an absolutely solidified, structural deficit -- utterly zero chance of paying down the debt, and a desperate need to constantly be borrowing more -- and an enormous debt. The trajectory of rates say this is crisis levels.

It's actually kind of funny reading your ridiculous comment -- "screaming", "echo chamber", etc -- when you sound completely in denial.

Your argument is basically the guy that used the "0% interest for six months" checks he just got with his 28% credit card, telling everyone that it's free money, so there's no problem if he goes wild. ROFL.

Sounds like it's time for a $1.5T military budget and a $1.3T bribe! Free money!

Sidenote: When asked about the bond market, Trump seriously offered up the "military solution". Utter insanity.

[1] - It's also simply a lie, making this extra funny. The highest historic servicing cost was 3.2% of GDP. It is currently projected at 3.3%, and that presumes rates don't keep spiralling up. So your "in fact" was simple bullshit, even as you tried the narrative shift by changing from debt to servicing costs.

This is as close as it can be to clearly explain. The problem is that most of our politicians are not explaining it and instead ignoring it. As an individual the only thing you can do is vote for candidates who are willing to have that hard conversation with the public. Unfortunately it looks like that would require voting for a third party candidate and a vanishingly small minority of the electorate is willing to do that. So given all of that context I'm not really sure that the term "Catastrophically indebted" is wrong.

You just pay off old promises that were expected to be kept.

The real risk is that new lenders will not be willing to lend you, yes. But not outright inflation.

Nobody has ever tried this before!

is unwilling, or has been told to be afraid of?

AI and robotics.

Engineering is becoming cheaper.

Graphics design is becoming cheaper.

Entertainment, film, and gaming (not hardware) is becoming cheaper.

This will eventually hit manufacturing and logistics and critical inputs.

We'll be able to have an entire robotic supply chain domestically save for raw materials.