There is one configuration that has worked to reduce deficits. Republican congress, with a Democratic president. Nothing gets done, no big spending bills get passed and no big tax cuts get signed by the president. We had better deficit outturns in both the latter 6 years of Clinton and latter 6 years of Obama than in other settings.
The article is absurd, and most of it can be ignored.
The comment thread is surprisingly good with FR understanding that this problem is enormous. We do have a few who want to use it to bolster their Never Trump hatred of reality, but math doesn’t care about that.
Here is what math cares about.
Currently $37 Trillion. About $6 trillion is owed to the Federal Reserve, whose QE created money-from-thin-air was used to buy Treasury issuance of bonds (aka loaned the money being borrowed by Treasury). This $6 trillion is paid interest by Treasury, but the Fed returns that interest back to Treasury. There was a brief time when this returned interest camouflaged itself as income (tax revenue), but I **think** that was cleaned up. If not, the deficit is worse than reported.
The interest rate on this debt is the composite of all the maturity levels. Meaning some is 3 month T bills and some is 7 year and 10 year and 30 year T notes and T bonds. That composite is 3.5%, and rising as the 0% interest items of 5 years ago roll off.
3.5% of $31 Trillion is about $1.1 Trillion. And rising as the 3.5% number rises and as the $31 Trillion rises. One good thing is out there on this. The Fed is now doing QT (Quantitative Tightening to undo Quantitative Ease) and this reduces slowly that $6T on deposit with them. This has no impact on interest, though, since they return that to Treasury.
But $1.1 Trillion. In interest. The deficit will come in about $2 Trillion this year. Over half of that can’t be controlled.
So stop thinking anyone has any ability to control any of this. It has gone too far. There is no solution. And it’s getting worse each year as that $2 Trillion is added to the debt and the interest rate rises (as it must unless we want 8% inflation forever — which btw would require that much increase in government spending just to hold it even).
No solution.