There are a lot of things like this that concern me. The treasury has been used repeatedly to buy votes, and the self-interested self-promoting selfish group of people who have populated public office over the past several decades have created a horrible mess. Things that could have been fixed with standard remedies previously are going to be much harder to fix now. I look at this like a localized malignancy that would have been easily surgically resected early on, but was let go to the point at which it metastasized to multiple places and is now only treatable with very toxic chemotherapy. I'm not sure there are any easy fixes at this point, or whether those things that have worked previously are going to work sufficiently well now.
Along those lines, I heard Greenspan speaking yesterday about the debt, the fact the population is aging, and that we have more and more people partaking of entitlements - while our productivity is not rising. He contributed to this, IMHO, but that's another story.
The only way out is a real tariff. But we will try everything else first.