Members of Gen Z won’t just benefit from the genius of artificial intelligence (AI) throughout their careers, they’ll also benefit from a federal government thankfully hamstrung by past spending errors. Lucky Gen Z.
Mindless as Social Security and Medicare are, and economically damaging as they were, they’ll spare those entering the working world now from all sorts of new government spending in all sorts of areas that government shouldn’t be involved in. This lack of expansive government spending will be great for young Americans, and by extension great for the U.S. economy. Think about it.
Government spending is in no way additive to prosperity or growth, rather it’s an obvious burden. That’s because the central planning of precious resources to varying degrees warps the people, towns, cities and states in which the spending takes place. And it almost never helps its recipients.
The good news is that by most accounts past mistakes like Social Security and Medicare will swallow a growing portion of federal outlays. Great. Unsuccessful as both programs have been (see all the retirement saving away from Social Security, and all the medical attention elderly Americans attain far away from Medicare), the programs presently deter Congress from creating large new spending burdens.
Which leads to another optimistic development: interest paid on the debt run up by spending errors in the past grows by the day. This is even better. It’s a sign that growing amounts of federal spending will just be directed to pay off debt run up to fund past errors. Yet another barrier to Congress “doing something(s).”
Think about what this means for Gen Z and the younger Americans who will follow Gen Z. While this write-up will in no way attempt to make a case for Americans being victimized by government waste (even with the waste, opportunity in the U.S. is still abundant), the government consumption surely isn’t helping them. That past errors will exist as a substantial barrier to new, surely expensive, and surely awful ideas from Congress is a most bullish development.
Which brings us to the greatest opportunity for Gen Z and those that will follow: it’s not a forever scenario that Social Security, Medicare and interest payments will consume so much of total federal tax revenues. It will eventually be true that Americans broadly will get so rich that tax revenues will dwarf those of the present. This will give Congress fresh money to direct to all new “priorities” that will in no way help Americans.
Which means the opportunity now is to have a serious conversation now about the future problem of too much tax revenue freeing future Congresses to wastefully spend on all manner of projects that will by definition hurt, not help Americans. And that’s because centralized allocation of precious resources is never a good thing for freedom or for economic growth.
Translated, the opportunity now is for Gen Z and future generations to get to work on reducing taxation so substantially that expected future revenues will decline. If so, governments in the future will “suffer” fewer dollars to spend, and will also be able to borrow much less exactly because reduced tax revenue intake will render the U.S. Treasury a substantially less appealing loan option.
Rich as Americans are, they haven’t scratched the surface of their potential thanks to being excessively taxed. Gen Z has a real opportunity to realize its potential due to past spending errors combined with an easy, reduced tax way to ensure no future federal spending errors.
