“We’ve [had] more than 4-plus percent GDP growth for most of our national history,” he says. “If we get back to…three-point-something, actually, most of those fiscal problems are completely gone.”
But that’s not right. According to quarterly data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, we calculate that annual GDP growth has averaged 2.7 percent since 1970, helped along by a rapidly growing labor force thanks to immigration, the baby boom, and women going to work. Let’s say Ramaswamy gets elected for two terms and unleashes economic growth that pushes the U.S. economy up to 4 percent GDP growth through 2033. Would most of our fiscal problems be “completely gone”? Not even close.
According to our calculations, the CBO projects that GDP will grow by 2 percent per year over the eight years of the next two presidential terms. Even if you double that to 4 percent annual growth—a rate more than double what it’s been so far in the 21st century—we’ll still be swimming in a sea of red ink.
[There’s only one cure for national debt: stop borrowing and start cutting. We might have been able to grow our way out of debt 30 years ago, but even that’s iffy. The structural underpinnings of massive national debt were put into place by LBJ and his Great Society, and we have only made it worse since then. — Ed]
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