The US national debt is the biggest economic fear. Three options exist: cancel it, inflate it away, or boost productivity to outgrow it. The 1990s showed this works: the Cold War ended, the internet surged, and Clinton had budget surpluses. AI could do the same today.
Chapters
When I look at the US, like, what's the— what is my biggest fear in the US right now? It's the spiraling of debt, right? And there's only 3 ways to get out of that. One is to cancel the debt. That doesn't sound very good. Um, one is to inflate your way out of the debt. Probably fine for you and me, but really bad for most people. It's fine for people that own a lot of assets. And then the last one is we become much more productive and we produce our way, if you will, out of the debt. And by the way, we saw a mini version of that back around the the time of the internet, we actually ran a number of budget surpluses in the Clinton years. And that was entirely due to, well, one was the Cold War dividend because we had sort of ended the Cold War. So we weren't spending as much on defense. We could learn something about that right now. And then two was that we just became a more productive society because we added the internet and internet technologies and personal computers, et cetera, into the mix. I think there's a chance that we do that with AI.
