I curious to know this because despite COVID 19 federal spending must still be curbed and fiscally responsible.
No one has a plan, because the American people are unwilling to take the hit.
The bottom line is, entitlements MUST be cut. And they won't be. The moment they try and cut Social Security, or Medicare, the public will have a toddler level temper tantrum, until things get so bad that they have no choice.
We've had two specific chances to tackle this problem, and the public simply doesn't care about math, and facts.... they "feel" like they deserve these things, and therefore they'll vote anyone into office who will tell them what they want to hear, whether it is true or not.
The first chance we had, was Bush in the 2000s. Bush was going to allow privatization of Social Security. This is what Chile does, and this what Singapore does, and it works.
Instead of a Ponzi scheme, where young people pay for old people, until the money runs out and the system implodes, everyone will have their own money, in their own account, with their own investments. Then it doesn't matter if the government runs a deficit or not, because you have your own money in your own account with your name on it.
Bush got rolled on this. People opposed it, and it was shot down.
The second chance was Greece.
Greece had the exact same problem. People warned Greece that their pension system was completely unsustainable. They warned them over and over, there isn't money for all these benefits. They warned them in the 1990s, all the way until the pension system ran out of money, the health care system ran out of money, the mass transit system ran out of money, the education system ran out of money, the government went into default, and nearly the entire country fell into ruins.
That was our warning shot. That was the sign from G-d in the sky, warning people this does not work.
And we didn't learn anything.
So I don't know what exactly is going to happen, but at this point if we had two clear chances to fix the system, then I don't know could possibly happen in the future, that will prevent a future crash. I don't know what will have to happen in this country, to make people wake up and realize that socialism doesn't work because you run out of other people's money.
My guess is, that what will have to happen, is that we will either have a crisis in the bond market, and that will wake people up (a crisis in the bond market means people refuse to lend money to the US government), or we will have insane inflation, that will harm the economy and result in a depression.
And there is a chance that we actually have default. That is still a possibility, where everything tied to government just gets cut, and we'll see retirees outside banks, on the ground crying. We'll see hospitals closed, with patients on the steps outside, like we did in Greece.
That is a real possiblity, but I wager one of the other two things will happen. Who knows. We'll see.