Mises Circle in Fort Myers
2024-01-17
Save the date!
Join the Mises Institute for a special Circle in Fort Myers, FL this November.
Registration, speaker details, and agenda forthcoming.
Can Classical Economics Explain the Approaching Fiscal Disaster?
2024-01-16
Today’s US fiscal predicament includes unprecedentedly high federal spending financed by inadequate tax revenue and high federal budget deficits. There is a lack of sufficient buyers of US Treasury debt. Rating agencies have recently downgraded the US debt, and entitlement benefits are forecast to outstrip their trust funds in a few years. How might a nineteenth-century English economist be relevant to this predicament?
Might this fiscal predicament be resolved naturally by rational consumers following their own instincts, thus precluding mandated top-down austerity or other harsh measures? Does our constitutional structure allow sufficient legislative and executive branch compromise to improve our fiscal trajectory? Or perhaps the only resolution is a bipartisan fiscal commission to