Accelerate Economic Growth

Not even unsustainable debt and already huge deficits stifle extravagant promise making. The frequent answer to how those promises can be kept is increased economic growth. Indeed, even without increased spending, achieving faster economic growth is a key to a low economic and political pain route to sustainable fiscal practices.

While cutting spending is very difficult politically, and possibly dangerous when defense spending is on the chopping block, achieving the faster economic growth needed to minimize spending cuts is by no means easy. The changes needed must more than offset the headwinds created by debt fatigue. For federal, state, and local barriers, it will be necessary to package the ways to accelerate economic growth in a way that appears to equally distribute the political pain; the reasons for the persistence of growth impediments. IOPA needs diverse participation to a) identify additional paths to increased economic growth, especially those that pertain to specific states; and b) develop a credible plan to equitably share the political pain of terminating political sacred cows that impede economic growth.

Dalibor Bohac, “It’s the Economy Stupid,”10/17/24: “As a rule of thumb, any debt burden can be sustainable if the rate of economic growth exceeds the rate at which the government is borrowing its funds. If Western nations are faced with genuinely existential threats in the form of Russian imperialism in Eastern Europe and China’s challenge to the Indo-Pacific, alongside the gradual crumbling away of international norms such as the freedom of navigation in places like the Red Sea, it is hard to see how accelerating growth could not be a priority.”