If you make the tax system substantially less progressive, as in Sweden or other often mentioned examples, I think it is quite possible to reach a sustainable level.
I partly agree though in that US spending really makes no sense. Other countries that raise more revenue are generally quite targeted in their spending, the US govt is not...at all. It makes no sense to say that the solution to bad spending is to generate more revenue...but it is also not particularly clear that there is any desire to think about how to spend more effectively, outside of slashing everything.
Btw, just generally this reflects how far the US is behind when it comes to intellectual discussions on policy. Most (but not all) discussions about these topics in the US take intellectual force from anti-scientific dogma. Elsewhere, politics has become an evidence-based study of the merit of policies. The former approach just isn't sustainable, the level of poverty in the US is quite shocking (to this outsider's perspective).
The debt is about 3x higher in real dollars, and about 2x higher relative to GDP. That doesn’t seem like the sort of change that would take you from “moderate” to “truly massive.”
Now we enter the area where almost no commenters understand how sovereign currency debt works, and what is required for a healthy economy.
It would take a mini-treatise to summarize what's wrong with this statement, so suffice it to say that there are several scenarios where such a debt is absolutely healthy and encouraged, and no one should use it as an excuse to put their foot further on the neck of the lowest rungs of socio-economic status.
The chief complaint is that many people have almost no money and a few people have almost all the money. Where is this money? It is in bank accounts. Where does the money in the banks comes from? The banks borrowed the money from the central banks. Where did the central banks get the money from? The central banks borrowed it from themselves. How will the central banks pay themselves back? They central banks hold, among other assets, a large quantity of US Treasury bonds. The central banks pay themselves back whenever the US government pays interest on its bonds. If we want people to have more money, then the banks need more money from the central banks, and the central banks need a larger quantity of US Treasury bonds. If we want to redistribute money using taxes, we probably would want even more US Treasury bonds to be issued.
According to https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v75n1/v75n1p1.html we reached peak social security surplus back around 2008, and cross the line into deficit real soon now. So instead of having extra revenue that can be spent, the budget now has to take into account redemptions of special social security bonds to fund current operations. From the Social Security Administrations perspective they have years of funding because of the trust fund. From a congressional perspective its a double hit to the budget No Surplus + have to pay back redemptions now.
So this was a wonderful time to give a trillion dollar tax cut to corporations.
I do not know how you reduce the size of the state with the baby boom bubble entering retirement. The paranoid part of me thinks the secret solution will be a 1918 Influenza resurgence that disproportionately takes out people over 70. Solves Social Security and Medicare expenditure at the federal level and the pension problem at the state and local level.
Debt isn’t a problem in reality. Especially as the world’s reserve currency. If that ever becomes not the case, we’ll the whole monetary system will be touched. I would google modern monetary theory. I think that is the future more or less.
I partly agree though in that US spending really makes no sense. Other countries that raise more revenue are generally quite targeted in their spending, the US govt is not...at all. It makes no sense to say that the solution to bad spending is to generate more revenue...but it is also not particularly clear that there is any desire to think about how to spend more effectively, outside of slashing everything.
Btw, just generally this reflects how far the US is behind when it comes to intellectual discussions on policy. Most (but not all) discussions about these topics in the US take intellectual force from anti-scientific dogma. Elsewhere, politics has become an evidence-based study of the merit of policies. The former approach just isn't sustainable, the level of poverty in the US is quite shocking (to this outsider's perspective).