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It's more than just a ticket. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My name is Joshua, and today we talk about the ticking bomb that no one is willing to defuse.

Perhaps I should retitle that. The ticking bomb that no one is willing to talk about the possibility or desirability of defusing, namely the US federal debt, the growing federal debt, the current deficit, the amount of money we borrow each year to fund our collective promises, and the increasing federal debt.

This is of course a common theme on Radical Personal Finance. I've discussed this many times over the last five years of the show, and today is no different. Nothing much has changed. However, I find it fascinating to look at what is not happening right now, which is why I'm reprising this topic, because I want to prove a point to you, namely that no one is willing to even talk about spending less money.

And if that is true, then why should we expect the future to be anything different? I'm especially interested in this with discussions of the recent Green New Deal legislation, or proposed legislation, which has all the political power right now in the world of politics. It's quite the interesting conversation.

I want to first deal with a couple of big questions. And there are two basic big questions that are really rebuttals or people saying, "Oh, they're objections." And I want to deal with two objections. Number one, objection number one, is federal borrowing, is governmental borrowing a problem? Frequently when I do these shows, I've received communication from listeners saying, "Joshua, listen, you are wrong about the fact that federal borrowing is a problem.

It's not a problem. In fact, there's a healthy level of debt that is good for a government to be engaged in. And don't you know, after all, you can't compare, what might be tempting to compare the federal government with an individual household. You can't do that because the individual household doesn't have taxing ability.

They don't have military ability to force that taxation upon their citizens, etc. So you just have to leave it how it is. It's not a problem." After a recent discussion of this, a listener of mine sent me a, I thought, particularly cogent question. And I share it with you as an interesting rebuttal to that objection.

The question is this, "Since it is believed that debt has no negative consequences and we can print our way out of any problem, what's the logical objection to a 0% income tax?" I repeat, "Since it is believed that debt has no negative consequences and we can print our way out of any problem, what's the logical objection to a 0% income tax?" Here's why I thought that particular question was so remarkable in terms of its phrasing.

There are only three sources of funds that a government has. There are only three sources of funds. And those three sources are, number one, taxation, create revenue for the government through taxation. Number two, borrowing, issuing of bonds or other debt instruments in order to borrow money from people who want to lend money to the government in exchange for interest.

And number three, inflation, inflation of the money supply so that today's obligations can be paid back with larger, sorry, less, more dollars in the future that are worth less. Those are the only three sources of government funds, taxation, borrowing, and inflation. Those are the only three levers that a politician has to push on.

Do they want to tax? Do they want to borrow? Or do they want to inflate? I can't think of a single additional source of government funds. I guess in theory we could make the argument fee for services, but whoever tries that. Taxation, borrowing, and inflation. So here's the question.

"Since it is believed that debt has no negative consequences and we can print our way out of any problem, what's the logical objection to a 0% income tax?" Now, lest you think that we are fighting against a straw man here with a discussion of the idea that debt has no negative consequences or that we can print our way out of any problem, let me refer you to your newspaper where I watch day after day after day mainstream publicly acclaimed persons, including some with the title of economists and popular columns in large newspapers, say day after day, "Debt has no negative consequences and the government always has the ability to print their money, print their way out of any problem." So why is it that taxation is always attacked?

Now consider that. Hopefully you find it interesting to consider in regard to your own situation. I'll give you some more specific examples in a moment. Objection number two is a little bit thornier. The second objection is this. "How do you know that this is the time that we'll be in crisis?" And here's where I think I'm very humble because I can trace back at least through the 1970s, the 1980s, the 1990s, the 2000s, and the 2010s, I can find article after article, prediction after prediction, prognostication after prognostication saying, "This is the end.

The government now owes $1 trillion." Well, here we are $21 trillion later. Or, "Now we're running a trillion dollar deficit." Well, here we are with years of trillion dollar deficits coming up. So I think we should be very humble about our timing because just to say that there is a problem doesn't mean that we can know when the problem will manifest itself.

In my mind, an engineering metaphor is appropriate. An engineer can go and inspect something like a bridge, a highway bridge, and the things that lead to bridges falling down are not unknown. They're not voodoo. It's not as though bridges all of a sudden fall for no reason. The vast majority of those things can be found with a proper and complete inspection.

An engineer can find a crack in a bridge. An engineer can recognize that this particular equipment, this particular substance, this steel, this concrete is being stressed beyond its design parameters. Those things can be found. Recently, there was a devastating dam break in Brazil. What's usually so amazing about those massive catastrophes is the engineers knew it was going to happen.

They knew it was going to happen. A couple of years ago, I watched another documentary on the space shuttle, I think it was Challenger, the one that blew up on liftoff. The engineers knew it was going to happen. It wasn't a shock to them. In fact, with the Challenger explosion, it was a massive issue of management where everyone said, "No, we've got to get this thing.

We've got to take this thing off." In that particular situation, forgive me if I botch some of the details of this, but the liftoff weather was too cold. The O-rings that were supposed to be sealing the rocket fuel were not tested and were not certified to be functional as they should be at that level of cold weather on the morning of liftoff.

There were warnings being sent to the NASA management team, "No, this is not certified." The engineers had said, "No, we shouldn't do this." But the NASA management team had to press forward and they bowled over the people who tried to stand in the way. They launched the shuttle and we all know the history, Challenger, everyone died.

Of course, it was a massive loss. The same thing could be applied to bridges and space shuttles. If an engineer inspects a bridge and they can find a crack, they know that in time that bridge will fail. The problem is, what does it mean in time? And there are various things that could change.

So the bridge, if you were trying to make an estimate, you could start with the severity of the crack, but then you also have to take into account other stresses. Is salt water weakening something in it or is it fresh water? What's the level of traffic going across the bridge, etc., etc., etc.

I'm not an engineer. You engineers can come up with many other things that affect it. And so when you're trying to make predictions on things that have many, many factors involved, you can't necessarily always get it right. About the best that you could hope for is to be directionally right, to know this is a problem and to watch it and to see what happens.

Now one of the books that I read last year that really helped me more than almost anything else to gain some historical perspective was a book called The Silk Road. And the author went through thousands of years of history of The Silk Road and talked about all the things that happened.

One of the things I was so struck by was the level of economic analysis that was in that book. It's not an economics book. It's a history book. But there was a huge amount of discussion of what happened to bring down all of these different empires throughout history. And in my personal copy, all over the place, I've got dollar signs, I've got interest rates, I've got borrowing, I've got collapse.

I see the threads throughout history in a way that's often hard to find. But the challenge is that's dealing with hundreds, literally in that book, thousands of years of history. And yet none of us have that perspective on our lifetime. We are constrained by the shortness of our own lives.

I personally have never lived in difficult economic times. I have never lived in difficult economic times. The few times when the global economy has been in recession, I've personally always been even insulated from those things. Yes, I've lived through 2008. I was insulated from it. I wasn't in a financially vulnerable situation.

I wasn't in a town that had a bad economy. I wasn't in a rural area. I wasn't in Detroit. Whatever. I was insulated from all of that. And so basically, my entire life, the economy has been fine. It's been good. So it's especially hard for me to believe those warnings.

So I want to just move on now from these two questions. And I simply want to say, in response to number one, is government debt a problem? The answer has to be yes, or at least yes it can be. And we would look to certain factors to understand if it's a problem.

A crack that's small and off to the side of the bridge doesn't necessarily mean that the whole bridge is going to collapse. A crack that's a hairline crack that's running right underneath the middle of the bridge is probably something we should pay attention to. I'm convinced, personally, that there's a hairline crack at the very least running right through the middle of the bridge.

And I'm going to use some data in today's show to show that to you. Number two, with regard to timing, I want to be always very humble, very humble with any kind of timing. I will say this. I do not expect there to be any kind of imminent financial crisis that's caused by government borrowing within the coming years, perhaps decade.

I don't expect that. I don't expect that. I want to be prepared in case it happens, but I don't expect that. Now, on the flip side, if I live a normal, long-lived lifespan, as I expect and hope to live, I will be shocked if it doesn't happen during my lifetime.

But there's a whole lot of room in there. Now, we'll get to how to solve it. In fact, I've just finished a course on how to solve it with a minimal amount of cost because of this uncertainty. But today, I just want to talk about some of the problems.

As I continue, thus far, I have tried to answer two common questions or objections. Now, the bulk of this show is going to be divided into two basic theses. Number one, thesis number one, no one in today's world is even willing to discuss the current problem. And that doesn't give me confidence for the future.

If today we're not even willing to discuss it publicly, I don't have any confidence that things are going to change in the future. And then number two, I think the problems are only getting worse. We'll get to that. Let's start about discussion. For today, I'm going to read you a few excerpts from an interesting article that was published October 17, 2018.

This particular article and its accompanying proposal or essay was from September 2018, almost six months ago. The title of the article is from Reason Magazine, Reason.com. "We've never had deficits like this during peace and prosperity before." Subheadline, "Brian Riedel has a plan to stabilize the national debt at 95% of GDP.

He says trying it might be political suicide, but the alternative is much worse." Now, I repeat, this is from six months ago as I record this show. I want to read to you a few important paragraphs. "On Monday, the Treasury Department reported that fiscal year 2018's budget deficit was the largest since 2012, and it is increasingly likely that America will see the return of a $1 trillion deficit before the end of 2019.

We've been here before, but this time it is different. When America ran a $1 trillion deficit in the years just after the 2008 economic collapse, the recovering economy quickly put a dent in the deficit. And even though it's been more than 20 years since the last time the federal government ran a surplus, a sense of an impending disaster passed as annual deficits reached merely into the hundreds of billions of dollars.

Now, after a decade of economic growth, the United States stands again at the edge of a $1 trillion deficit, not the result of a sudden economic downturn, but caused by the inexorable growth of entitlement programs, and exacerbated by the current Congress' decision to hike spending while also cutting taxes.

Unlike a decade ago, this looming debt crisis won't be solved by a few years of economic growth. Even under the rosiest of scenarios, the federal deficit is on course to hit $2 trillion by the middle of the next decade. The national debt totals more than $20 trillion and continues to grow.

On its current trajectory, it will surpass the size of the nation's economy, a level that has been seen only at the height of World War II before 2030. Social Security will go bankrupt a few years after that, and mandatory benefit cuts will be enacted. As America passes those various harbingers of fiscal doom, it's likely that the rest of the world will take notice and stop lending money to the United States or demand higher interest payments for future borrowing, compounding the problem.

"Eventually you'll be left with two choices," Brian Riedel, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, tells Reason. "Either significantly raise taxes on the middle class or significantly cut benefits to current seniors. If we do neither, you will have a major financial crisis." It goes on and we talk about a report that Brian Riedel published.

I want to skip to a couple of important questions where he talks about basically his idea of talking about how he approaches his report, which is to say that if five years from now, that there are certain things that can be done now so that five years from now we can start to have a conversation about changing spending, changing taxes, changing something so that there will be some sanity restored to our fiscal situation.

So the Reason reporter starts with the questions. "I want to start with the numbers in this report because there are some big, really scary numbers here, but also numbers that I think are very difficult for people to conceptualize. Within the next year, we will be running a trillion-dollar annual deficit.

That's a huge number. How should we think about that?" Riedel. "We're about to be hit with a fiscal tsunami that we're not prepared for. The national debt right now is $20 trillion, and we're going to be hit with an $84 trillion shortfall over the next 30 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

And that's the rosy scenario. One way to think about it is, in order to pay for all of this, your federal tax burden would have to double. As a percentage of the economy, federal spending is going to grow towards European levels." Reason writes this. "You write a lot in this study about 2023, five years from now, as being a significant threshold for addressing these problems.

Why is that?" Riedel. "The proposals that I recommend to avert this debt crisis start five years from now, and it's not because we can afford to wait five years. As a matter of fact, waiting five years will make things a lot worse than if we do it now. It's an acknowledgment of the politics at play.

Politically, we are not close to being ready for the kind of reforms we are going to need. Not only is the country in denial, the House is in denial, the Senate is in denial, the White House is in denial. I think we may need five years of trillion-dollar deficits just to lay the groundwork." Reason.

"Baby Boomers retiring, as you said, is driving this huge expansion in the cost of two old-age entitlement programs, Social Security and Medicare. How much of this entire deficit problem is the entitlement spending? Can't we cut in other areas to offset that?" Riedel. "Over the next 30 years, Social Security and Medicare will run a $100 trillion deficit.

Social Security will run an $18 trillion deficit, Medicare $41 trillion, and the interest on that debt will be $41 trillion more. The rest of the budget is going to run a $16 trillion surplus over the next 30 years. In other words, our long-term deficit is 100% the result of Social Security and Medicare." Revenues, even if the tax cuts are extended, are going to continue rising above historical averages.

Every other part of the budget is shrinking as a percentage of GDP. This is 100% Social Security and Medicare, and that is the result of two factors, 74 million retiring baby boomers and growing health care costs. In Medicare, the average couple retiring today will have paid $140,000 into the system over their lifetime and will get $420,000 back.

When you throw 74 million baby boomers into a system that pays you back triple what you put in, it's going to blow up. The reason I fixate so much on Social Security and Medicare is because the hole is too big to be closed in any other part of the budget.

Reason goes on. When it comes to tackling this problem, it's helpful to think about these costs as a percentage of GDP. Because $1 trillion is hard enough to understand, and $84 trillion over 30 years is a figure I can't really wrap my head around either. But in this paper, you're presenting a series of ideas for addressing the debt crisis, and they're all scored by how much revenue they would raise as a percentage of GDP.

It's a little bit like a choose your own adventure here. But before we get into those proposals, explain why it's helpful to think in terms of percentage of GDP. Our debt to GDP ratio, for example, is almost higher than it's ever been. Riedel. Historically, the debt has been around 40% of GDP since the end of World War II, on average.

In fact, when the Great Recession started in 2007, the debt was almost exactly 40% of GDP. If we just keep the current policies, it's going to be approximately 200% of GDP in 30 years. The danger is, as the debt gets bigger, interest rates go up. That means you have to borrow more money to pay the interest, but that just makes the debt bigger.

So you have a vicious cycle of debt and interest rates. My plan is to stabilize the debt at 95% of GDP permanently. Now, let me interrupt here and just explain. This proposal and the numbers I'm about to go through with these ideas, quote unquote, don't pay off the debt.

All it does is freeze it at 95% of GDP, which is more than double of what it was in 2007. So listen to how impossible these numbers are that I'm about to go to and recognize. This is not about paying off the debt. This is not about reducing the debt.

This is about stabilizing the debt at 95% of GDP. Reason. Let's go through some of your ideas. On the left, we often hear the idea that we can raise taxes on the rich to fund entitlements. Riedel. The tax the rich argument is pretty common. It's not even close to sufficient.

If you just look at an extreme example, let's have the government sees all income earned over $500,000 per year, you would raise 5% of GDP. Even if you seized every dollar over $500,000 per year, you still wouldn't close the gap. Another example, the two top tax brackets right now are 35% and 37%.

If you double them to 70 and 74%, you get maybe 1.5% of GDP out of the 6% you need. And that's with a doubling of federal tax rates on the rich. It is mathematically impossible to close this gap by tax hikes for the rich. Reason. That gets you maybe a quarter of the way there.

Riedel. Yeah, you're a quarter of the way there, but that's before you take into account any economic feedback effects for tax evasion or tax avoidance. Reason. Our friends on the left also like to talk about a value-added tax, which is basically a more robust sales tax. This is something that's quite common in Europe, and on some level, this makes sense to me.

If we're going to have a welfare state that's as expensive as the ones across Europe, we'd probably have to tax like Europe to pay for it. Riedel. Realistically, if you're going to close this gap with tax, you're going to have to do what Europe does and tax the middle class.

The United States would need a 34% national sales tax just to pay for the current spending that has been promised in the pipeline and stabilize the debt at 95%. Alternatively, we could raise the payroll tax. That would have to be raised to 33% to pay for all the spending.

And importantly, you're not adding any new benefits. You're not adding any of Bernie Sanders' wish list here. This is just to pay for the benefits of senior citizens. Do middle class families want to pay a 34% value-added tax for benefits they may never see? For benefits that flow exclusively to senior citizens?

And let's remember that senior citizens today are the wealthiest age group in the wealthiest country in world history. We're going to raise $80 trillion over 30 years and give it to the wealthiest group in the country rather than using it on any of our other national interests? Reason. So we can't tax the rich to solve this.

Let's talk about some of the other options. On the right, we usually hear about closing tax loopholes or doing away with tax credit programs, the earned income tax credit, the mortgage deduction. Those ideas bring in more revenue, but how does that measure up against what we need? Riedel, there is a policy case for closing tax loopholes, but in terms of the 6% of GDP that has to be raised, they are not even a rounding error.

Those add up to approximately 0.1% of GDP. It's okay to advocate those policies, but let's not kid ourselves. It is pennies compared to what is needed. Reason. What about economic growth? The tax cuts were going to pay for themselves, we were told, because of the economic growth they would unleash.

That didn't happen, of course, but the economy is doing well right now. Can we roll the dice and hope this just continues forever? Riedel. If we had a historic surge of economic growth, in theory, that could close 40% of the long-term gap, until you realize that social security benefits are tied to the economy.

The faster the economy grows, the more incomes rise, and therefore the higher social security benefits you automatically qualify for. Even if the growth comes, a lot of the money goes right back out in automatically higher benefits. Reason. That might be worse than the feedback loop with the debt. Even if the times are good, we can't get out of this hole.

Riedel. If there were an easy solution, we would have solved this decades ago. Reason. We've danced around this for a while, but you really can't get away from it. The politics of what you are proposing, of what you are saying is necessary, just seem completely impossible to surmount. You're pretty up front about the fact that this is going to take a combination of difficult choices from both parties, but where is the appetite for that going to come from?

Riedel. There is no appetite for that in Washington. None. Republicans are cutting taxes, and Democrats are proposing $42 trillion in new spending over 10 years. No one is taking this even remotely seriously. The challenge right now is that when you talk to people about how to solve the long-term debt crisis, everyone has their pet theory that is simplistic, easy to understand, and completely wrong.

As long as everyone has their pet theory on how to fix this, no one is going to be willing to endure the real pain it is going to take. Reason. Best case scenario probably is that a group of Democrats and a group of Republicans get together after the midterms, look at that looming $1 trillion deficit, read your report, and decide to pursue some of the options you've outlined here.

Even if that were to happen, whoever proposes these huge tax increases or new taxes, I imagine, would be immediately run out of office. Even if there were a centrist coalition in Washington that could make this happen, would voters allow it? Listen carefully to Riedel's response. "My plan, as written, is political suicide.

And this is probably the most politically plausible plan that could probably solve the long-term problem, and even this would be political suicide. It raises taxes across the board, it restrains Social Security and Medicare, it allows defense to continue falling as a percentage of GDP. The argument that I am making is that the status quo or any alternative solution is even worse." That, my friends, is not a bright picture.

Remember again that Riedel's plan here is to stabilize federal borrowing and the federal deficit at 95% of GDP. And as he writes there, it is political suicide. Now that particular interview was from six months ago. And I ask you this question, what has happened since the publication of that interview in October of 2018 to March of 2019?

Have we suddenly had a massive cadre of fiscally conservative Republicans and Democrats start to come together and say, "Let's tackle this problem seriously. Let's start to talk about some solutions that we could engage in and think about how we could solve our problem." Has that happened in the last six months?

Can you point me to a single person who is vigorously, repeatedly advocating for fiscal restraint, who's dealing with reality? I can't point to anybody. Rather what we see is a massive press with a lot of energy going in exactly the other way. Which brings me to the Green New Deal.

Now I was fascinated, I have been fascinated over the last weeks to watch the conversation as it relates to the so-called Green New Deal. And I was fortunate enough to bumble into this story in real time. I try to minimally pay attention to politics. I have a disease, an addiction that I can't quite overcome.

So unfortunately I pay more attention than I probably should. But I try to at least keep it modest and moderate in terms of the amount of time that I spend on it. But a couple of weeks ago I happened to bumble into the Green New Deal on the very day that it was starting to be published.

Where the various representatives started to publish all of their documents, etc. It's fascinating for me to watch it develop in real time. Now the most important thing to me has been to watch the way that public perception of documents is handled based upon putting things out and not putting things out.

My personal summary of what happened was the proponents of the Green New Deal, sponsor in the House, in the US House, sponsor in the Senate, started to put all the documents out. And then they started to receive massive pushback on the silliness of their proposals. And then they started to take things back.

And then they tried to say, "Well listen, a bunch of stuff got out early that wasn't supposed to get out." That's still the case of what is said. Now I took the original documents as basically the opening gambit in negotiation. You go to a local bazaar and they say you're going to buy something and you ask how much it is.

It's $100. And you counter by saying I'll give you $5. And you both know you're making stupid offers and you're going to meet somewhere around the middle but that's how the game is played. So that's how I took it. But what's happened is I've watched the proponents of the Green New Deal dramatically even pull back and not even be willing to say that rather to say, "Oh, well some stuff leaked out there." I don't buy that for an instant because I was watching it in real time.

I carefully sourced my data. I was having various documents and things on mainstream websites. And now the idea is that the Frequently Asked Questions document, the Green New Deal fact, which is not the same as legislation that was submitted, was released accidentally, which is nonsense because somehow it was sent publicly to all of the mainstream news websites and published on a US House of Representatives official website as a valuable document.

But what I found in this particular document to be so fascinating, and if you're not familiar with it, it calls for dramatic change. The idea that we have to make a massive investment in our society by basically a laundry list of almost every single thing that the left wing kind of dream list of everything that would be happening.

So here's from the reading directly from the Frequently Asked Questions that was published. It says this, "This is a massive transformation of our society with clear goals and a timeline. The Green New Deal resolution, a 10-year plan to mobilize every aspect of American society at a scale not seen since World War II to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions and create economic prosperity for all." It will move America to 100% clean and renewable energy, create millions of family-supporting wage union jobs, ensure a just transition for all communities and workers to ensure economic security for peoples and communities that have historically relied on fossil fuel industries, ensure justice and equity for frontline communities by prioritizing investment, training, climate, and community resiliency, economic and environmental benefits in these communities, build on FDR's second bill of rights by guaranteeing a job with family-sustaining wage, family and medical leave, vacations and retirement security, high-quality education including higher education and trade schools, clean air and water and access to nature, healthy food, high-quality healthcare, safe, affordable, adequate housing, economic environment free of monopolies, economic security for all who are unable or unwilling to work." Now I'm reading directly from the Green New Deal Frequently Asked Questions which was, according to the top of it, was scheduled to be launched on Thursday, February 7th at 8.30am.

And it was a little bit later on February 7th when I pulled that document from the official website after reading about it on an NPR story. Now today that document is disputed. It's said that that document is not, that's not the official legislation etc. You can dig into that.

It's all lies. Now let's move on to here's what's most important for you to hear from this particular document. Listen carefully to this Frequently Asked Question quoting from the document. "How will you pay for it? "The same way we paid for the New Deal, the 2008 Bank Bailout and extended quantitative easing programs.

The same way we paid for World War II and all our current wars. The Federal Reserve can extend credit to power these projects and investments and new public banks can be created to extend credit. There is also space for the government to take an equity stake in projects to get a return on investment.

At the end of the day, this is an investment in our economy that should grow our wealth as a nation. So the question isn't how we will pay for it, but what will we do with our new shared prosperity." Now think back to the three methods that the government has of creating money or revenue.

Taxation, borrowing or inflation. Think back to our discussion on taxation and notice what is missing from here, from this Frequently Asked Question. Now I continue reading with the very next Frequently Asked Question. "Why do we need a sweeping Green New Deal investment program? Why can't we just rely on regulations and taxes and the private sector to invest a loan such as a carbon tax or a ban on fossil fuels?" Continuing verbatim quoting, "The level of investment required is massive.

Even if every billionaire and company came together and were willing to pour all the resources at their disposal into this investment, the aggregate value of the investments they could make would not be sufficient. The speed of investment required will be massive. Even if all the billionaires and companies could make the investments required, they would not be able to pull together a coordinated response in the narrow window of time required to jumpstart major new projects and major new economic sectors.

Also, private companies are wary of making massive investments in unproven research and technologies. The government, however, has the time horizon to be able to patiently make investments in new tech and R&D without necessarily having a commercial outcome or application in mind at the time the investment is made." Skipping down a little bit.

Dropping down a few paragraphs. "Once again, we're not saying there isn't a role for private sector investments. We're just saying the level of investment required will need every actor to pitch in and that the government is best placed to be the prime driver." Back to the sentence I said before.

"Even if all the billionaires and companies could make the investments required," or different sentence, "Even if every billionaire and company came together and were willing to pour all the resources at their disposal into this investment, the aggregate value of the investments they could make would not be sufficient." Now, the document is very poorly written.

And when I first read it, I laughed. I thought it was a joke. And then I started looking at it and I said, "Wait a second." I said, "This has got to be a joke. I'm being trolled here. I'm being fooled. This is a joke." "No, mainstream news site, mainstream news site." So I checked all my documents.

Now, here are the public statements about this particular document referencing some of these mainstream news articles, etc. You have Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a current declared presidential candidate. "A Green New Deal is ambitious, it's bold, and I'm co-sponsoring this resolution with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Markey because it's exactly the kind of action it will take to conquer the biggest threat of our lifetime." Senator Cory Booker signs on, officially endorses it.

Senator Kamala Harris, "I'm proud to co-sponsor this document with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey. It's a Green New Deal. We must aggressively tackle climate change which poses an existential threat to our nation." Senator Elizabeth Warren, declared candidate for leading, all these, by the way, these four leading candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination.

"If we want to live in a world with clean air and water, we have to take real action to combat climate change now. I'm proud to join Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Markey on a Green New Deal resolution to fight for our planet and our kids' futures." So, in the United States of America, we have one political party that is content with running trillion dollar deficits in a time of economic prosperity where nobody wishes to show any fiscal constraint, at least that I can find, and we have another political party that wishes to completely transform the U.S.

American economy. Now, I appreciate realism in political leaders. I really do. I appreciate that there are political leaders in the Democratic Party that are somewhat dismissive of this particular type of approach. But when you have major, when you have all of the energy is focused on this particular set of legislation, these particular ideas, it's very worrying in terms of our ability in the next five years to get to the point of freezing the U.S.

debt at 95% of GDP. I count that as impossible. Now, here's what I would ask of you. Don't believe or disbelieve me. Don't necessarily argue with me on these particular points. Rather, watch what's happening over the next six months, over the next year, over the next couple of years.

Recognize the absolute impossibility as that as Riedel talked about in the article reference, the political suicide of anybody getting involved just simply to try to freeze things in a bad situation. Recognize that, as Riedel wrote, I repeat, my plan as written is political suicide. And this is probably the most politically plausible plan that could probably solve, could probably solve, the long term problem.

And even this would be political suicide. It raises taxes across the board. It restrains Social Security and Medicare. It allows defense to continue falling as a percentage of GDP. And yet it's political suicide. I want to read back to the Reason article. I want to read the next question from, the next two questions from the interview.

Reason asks this, "By the mid 2030s, there are going to be benefit cuts in Social Security. That's not 2023, but maybe there's some sort of a political trigger there that can push things?" Riedel, "In 2034, the Social Security Trust Fund goes bankrupt and will require an automatic 20% benefit cut.

That's written in the law. The danger is, if we wait until 2034 to fix Social Security, we're dead. By that point, we will have already had a substantial debt crisis." Reason, "How do you expect that debt crisis to unfold?" Riedel, "The danger is that if the debt keeps growing, at a certain point investors will stop lending us money at reasonable interest rates.

They will be reasonably concerned that the debt is growing beyond our ability to finance it. They will demand higher interest rates, and every one percentage point increase in interest rates will add $13 trillion in interest costs over 30 years. As interest rates go up, we will have to borrow even more to make the interest payments, which causes the debt to go even higher.

At a certain point, the investors will demand that we get our fiscal house in order. It will likely start with low-hanging fruit, tax hikes for the rich for example, but those won't be enough. Eventually, you'll be left with two choices, either significantly raise taxes on the middle class, or significantly cut benefits to current seniors.

If we do neither, you will have a major financial crisis. What that looks like remains to be seen, because we've never seen an international power with such a huge economy go through what we are about to go through." In the years that I have been paying attention to finances, years as a financial advisor, and now years doing radical personal finance, I have never wanted, ever wanted to be an extremist on issues like this.

I have resisted it, I have rejected it, I have never wanted to be lumped in with all of the other extremists. I've never wanted it. But at some point in time, you've got to look at the data. And I would invite you to look at the data for yourself, and to watch what happens in the coming six months, or year, etc.

For me, I have decided that this entire realm of risk has to be moved from possible risks to probable risks. Now, I don't know the extent of the risk, I don't know the extent of the crack in the bridge, but when you look at this stuff and you say, an open, careful analysis looks at it and says, "The numbers, everything is wrong in the numbers," and a finger in the wind, to dope the wind to find out what's happening in the political environment says, "All of the pressure in the political environment is wrong." I sure hope I'm wrong, but as far as I'm concerned, this is a ticking bomb that will likely go off during my lifetime.

Now, that's a big scant van of time, and I don't know. But I do know this, there are solutions. There are ways to protect yourself against this, and I consider the risks efficient to not sit around and waste time, and not sit around and not take action. I'm responsible for protecting those in my household, and for caring for them.

And let me tell you this, I have studied this subject, and the reality of life in this kind of world is not pretty. Just last week, I was talking with a family who was on vacation from Argentina, and there are a couple of current, basically ongoing collapses that I have watched.

It's all well and good for me to read about the Weimar Republic, but that was decades and decades and decades ago, and it's just not current. I can't look at that on the internet, I have to read classical books and historically written books. But the ones that I have watched have been Argentina and Venezuela, what is currently happening in both of those countries.

And I was recently speaking with an Argentinian family, and we were just talking about what's actually happening, and what's actually happened in Argentina. And I won't share too much, but just put it this way, it is awful. Living in Argentina right now is terrible. It is absolutely terrible, and you fear for your life on a daily basis.

Living in Venezuela right now is terrible. You fear for your life on a daily basis. I've had a couple of friends from Venezuela who sought refuge in the United States, and you hear some of the stories from their family and whatnot who is still stuck in Venezuela. It is absolutely terrible.

And as difficult as it is for me to believe that the United States of America can go down the same path as a Venezuela or an Argentina, the cold, logical side of me says, "These are not the Weimar Republic." Most especially and importantly, Argentina. Argentina is an incredible country, massive country with huge wealth, and yet look at where things have been for the last almost two decades now in Argentina.

So, in coming days, I will share with you more on solutions for it. But here's what you need to be prepared for. You need to be prepared for higher taxes. What is your plan to escape those higher taxes, lest they ruin your wealth? Number two, you need to be prepared for loss of programs, loss of benefits.

If you are counting on Medicare, if you are counting on Social Security, if you're counting on those things to prop you up, read the math. I would say read the tea leaves, but tea leaves are not nearly as reliable as math. Read the math. You can't count on it.

It absolutely will change. The benefits will change. They have to change. And in fact, one of the things that I've been fascinated by is I watch reproduction rates. And in the United States as well as in much of the world, birth rates have fallen so much that in many ways the disaster could be even worse.

And when you compound that with problems of immigration, anyway, read the math. So don't count on government programs. You have to have a plan to provide for yourself. And you have to have a plan to get out and provide for yourself and your family should we face a worst case scenario of currency mass inflation and/or hyperinflation because that is what destroys a society.

I have finished the outline for the course, the next course that I am launching. The outline, this particular course is called How to Survive and Thrive During the Coming Economic Collapse, a Rational Modern Approach. Again, it's How to Survive and Thrive During the Coming Economic Collapse, a Rational Modern Approach.

In just a minute, I'll give you a coupon code if you'd like to get in early and buy the course and save some money. I'll tell you how to do that in just a moment. But let me tell you why I wrote this course. I consider at this point in time, it's my analysis, that the problems that we discussed won't be solved by the political regime that we currently have.

I don't see how it's possible that they could be solved. The people proposing solutions, the most optimistic of them don't actually solve much and I don't see any discussion of actual solutions. So I don't see how it's possible that they be solved. But the problem is, when do the problems start to reveal themselves?

And that's a maddening problem. If I thought that tomorrow, my neighbors were going to start shooting me for food, then I would probably do things a little bit differently. I've interviewed a lot of people on this show, many of whom come from that perspective. One of the questions, Jim Rawls, James Wesley Rawls has been on the show a couple of times.

One of the things I've always posed to him is, "Jim, how do you have such certainty about the certainty of collapse?" He's very strong on his level of certainty scale. I'm generally uncomfortable with those kinds of levels of certainty. But if I thought that, then maybe I would be willing to move to the boonies and live in a cabin with my family.

But at this point in time, it's hard. It's very hard for me in the life that I want to live to conceive that it's right for me to move to the mountains and live in a cabin or to build a nuclear bunker under the world. I respect those who do, but it's hard for me to fit that into my optimism for life and to figure out how does this actually integrate.

And so the problem that you face is, number one, what do you do? And number two, how much money do you spend? Do you take all your money out of the stock market and say, "Well, I'm going to go and buy food and guns so I can live during the coming economic collapse?" Some people do.

I have a hard time giving that advice to people because I consider the timing to be so uncertain on these kinds of affairs that it's just very uncertain. So in many ways, I'd rather have an insurance policy if it were possible to have an insurance policy. And I'd rather have a plan that could develop in time rather than my freaking out and moving to the top of a mountain or buying a missile silo in Montana and moving into it, a decommissioned missile silo.

I think those things are cool, but that's not right for me right now. And so what I've outlined in this particular course is my best solution, which is basically run away from problems. But here's how you run away from the problems in a thoughtful, intelligent way. And that's what it is, how to survive and thrive during the coming economic collapse.

So what I am doing right now is putting in place all of the infrastructure necessary in order for my family and me to survive and thrive during the coming economic collapse. And to me, this seems to be the most rational perspective to take, is to say, "I think that there can be problems.

I acknowledge that the problems are probable. I don't know the timing of those problems. So let me have a plan that I can adjust and adapt over time that allows me to live well if everything goes wrong or live well if nothing goes wrong." Because when we put things into historical perspective and you recognize that since the 1970s and since the 1980s and since the 1990s and since before that, people have been preaching gloom and doom from the mountaintop and yet it hasn't happened, I think it should give us today a little bit more caution to preach gloom and doom and say, "By the end of this year, it's all going to fall apart." I don't think that's the case.

So I would invite you at this point in time, if this is interesting to you, to come by radicalpersonalfinance.com, click on "Store" and follow the link for my newest course called "How to Survive and Thrive During the Coming Economic Collapse." I am launching that course on – well, you can purchase it now at a presale and I am launching it on March 15.

Just to give you a little bit of insight, my working outline which you will download, my just simple outline for that course is 82 pages in Microsoft Word right now, 82 pages. So this course is packed with basically everything that I know of and can think of to share with you, to help you put in place a robust and vigorous plan.

And I think you'll find it to be a tremendous, tremendous value. I've worked very hard on it. I have recorded – I finished recording about two-thirds of the content right now for the course videos. Within the next couple of weeks, at least the first several of those videos will be launched by March 15.

They'll be edited and uploaded so they'll be ready to go for you. So if you would like to buy during the prelaunch sale, I would invite you to come by radicalpersonalfinance.com, click on store, buy the How to Survive and Thrive During the Coming Economic Collapse. And here is the coupon code which will save you 25% off the retail price.

This is only good until March 15 but the coupon code is prelaunchdiscount. Again, it's prelaunchdiscount, all together, no spaces, prelaunchdiscount, no hyphen, prelaunchdiscount. That'll save you 25% on the cost of the course. And again, the course will go live on March 15. One of the things that I – reasons that I'm doing this is I would like to have a bunch of you lined up to start that on March 15 because I'm going to be very active in answering the questions and discussing with you during the first couple of months of this particular course because although this is my plan and this is what I'm doing, I want to help you also put in place practical plans for you.

And one of the things you'll appreciate about the course is everything in it is very scalable. You don't have to have a million bucks. You got to have at least a few thousand bucks. If you don't have a few thousand bucks, that's your first thing. Don't worry about economic collapse if you're worried about being kicked out of your house.

Go and do something else and fix that problem and then come. But you don't have to have a million bucks to be prepared for this. So go to radicalpersonfinance.com, click on the store and join me for the prelaunch. Again, prelaunchdiscount is the coupon code that will save you 25% off and expect us to talk about this more in coming years.

I will tell you this. First, my plan doesn't involve spending money that I would regret. And that's one of the things I've tried very hard to do is to not let doom and gloom thinking cause me to have regret. I think sometimes that can happen to people. If you don't want to live out in the country in a missile bunker, then don't.

But if you want to live in a missile bunker, then you can do it without regret. So the point is, I don't want to spend a bunch of money or a bunch of problems on something that I might regret. I've got to have a plan that works if history of the future turns out to be much the way it has been for past decades.

If everything goes well during my life, I can't have a very expensive plan that all falls apart. But on the other hand, I can't sit around with my head in the sand. And at this point, you can see that in the last six months since that particular article and study was published, nothing good has come of it.

No, no, no, no. National public conversation between centrist Republicans and Democrats is happening. Nobody's talking about fiscal restraint. If anything, it's getting worse. So the data is indicating yellow and red lights all across the board. Now is time for you to provide for yourself. And I need to say one last caveat as I close the show.

This should factor into your investment plans, but you always have to remember that the government is not the market. Companies and governments are different. Now, how that works out varies depending on the actual circumstances involved in. But I always try to be very careful. I'm not talking about the stocks or stock market.

I'm talking about the federal budget. And that is a key distinction. So talk with your financial advisor about your stocks. I'm not here to do that today. Here today, I'm just simply here to say it's time, mom. If you see people talking about how to defuse it, let's be very optimistic because I don't want to go through an economic collapse.

But at this point, I think prudence indicates it's time to prepare so that we survive and thrive during what by all accounts seems to be a future economic collapse. Go to radical personifies dot com, click store and use the coupon code prelaunch discount to get 25% off from today until March 15.

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