The Boyd Institute

A policy lab for America's future. Bold solutions for a post-boomer world. Current sprint: US national debt & deficits. Follow/subscribe/donate

[The Boyd Institute @boydinst]

Everyone thinks the Fed chose to print trillions in 2020. It didn't choose; it was the last one in the room when the check came. The real story runs upstream: voters love spending, hate the bill, and whoever would cut gets fired. So nobody cuts, for decades, and the debt has to land somewhere — always on the central bank. Japan's frozen at 250% of GDP.

In other words, the Fed proved the MMT cranks right and yields are whatever you say, not because it agreed but because it ran out of ways to say no.

https://t.co/aM0zG7BmRs

[The Boyd Institute @boydinst]

Proponents of MMT are correct that monetary sovereigns can monetize their debt, but that strategy did not work out so well for the Soviet Union.
https://t.co/7xnDetGo44

[The Boyd Institute @boydinst]

Public trust in government has fallen precipitously since the early 1960s and is near a historic low.
https://t.co/EkRQzHQZtK

[The Boyd Institute @boydinst]

Peter Banks argues that public sector unions have evolved from worker advocacy organizations into entrenched political machines that distort incentives, inflate pension liabilities, and block meaningful government reform.

Drawing on examples from education, policing, and state governance, he contends that public unions wield disproportionate political power because the government is effectively “bargaining with itself.”
https://t.co/h6GEm7jDTt

[The Boyd Institute @boydinst]

"People under 25 and over 65 receive substantially more in government spending than they pay in taxes, while working-age adults (roughly 35 to 54) are net contributors. The imbalance is especially pronounced for Americans over 75, who receive tens of thousands of dollars more per year in benefits than they pay in."
https://t.co/qeKbiPfct5

[The Boyd Institute @boydinst]

The Soviet Union didn't collapse because communism lost the argument. It collapsed because the state ran out of money.

Three obligations ate the state alive: military spending at 15–17% of GNP (triple the US share at the time), subsidies to satellite states and peripheral republics, and domestic food and housing subsidies that grew from 4% to 20% of the state budget.

Oil revenues masked the problem through the 1970s. When crude prices halved in 1985–86, the mask came off. Debt exploded from $16.5B in 1980 to $105B by dissolution. By 1989, debt servicing alone consumed 30% of hard-currency exports. In 1991, the foreign-trade bank suspended payments — and four days later, the USSR was gone.

The pattern isn't unique to the Soviets. Peter Banks at The Boyd Institute draws a careful parallel to the US, where 2025 net interest outlays hit $970 billion — roughly equal to the combined budgets of Defense, Homeland Security, Agriculture, Interior, the EPA, and the entire legislative branch.

https://t.co/jIH8f4fYZ5

[The Boyd Institute @boydinst]

William Miller provides a comprehensive overview of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and what it gets wrong. Proponents of MMT say that governments issuing debt in their own currency can effectively finance deficits indefinitely because interest rates and bond demand are ultimately policy choices.

But the reality is that policymakers can suppress market constraints only temporarily. Once inflation returns, those constraints reassert themselves with force. The result is exactly what we’re seeing now: rising borrowing costs, exploding interest payments, and growing fiscal pressure on both taxpayers and the Fed.
https://t.co/wUQTV4Fjud

[The Boyd Institute @boydinst]

William Miller provides a comprehensive overview of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and what it gets wrong. Proponents of MMT say that governments issuing debt in their own currency can effectively finance deficits indefinitely because interest rates and bond demand are ultimately policy choices. But the reality is that policymakers can suppress market constraints only temporarily. Once inflation returns, those constraints reassert themselves with force. The result is exactly what we’re seeing now: rising borrowing costs, exploding interest payments, and growing fiscal pressure on both taxpayers and the Fed.
https://t.co/wUQTV4Fjud

[The Boyd Institute @boydinst]

"Federal debt spiked to roughly 106% of GDP at the end of World War II, then steadily declined for three decades as the postwar economy grew faster than the debt stock. Starting in the 1980s the trend reversed, and today debt is approaching the WWII peak. CBO’s projections have it blowing past that record and heading toward 175% of GDP by the mid-2050s."
https://t.co/qeKbiPfct5

[The Boyd Institute @boydinst]

"The honest framing is this: every dollar of new debt is simultaneously a decision to fund something now and a decision to transfer tax revenue to bondholders for decades after. Politicians on the left argue in favor of funding transfers with debt the entire time committing to future transfers to the rich. And the right denounces spending while hypocritically presiding over exploding deficits. Something needs to change or soon we won’t be able to afford anything but redistributing taxpayer dollars to asset-holders, foreign and domestic."
https://t.co/zo8NASjkZO

[The Boyd Institute @boydinst]

Foreign demand for US Treasuries keeps climbing — even through the 2022-23 Fed hike cycle. Near $9.3T in 2025-Q3. Rates create their own demand if the US remains credibly "risk free".

[The Boyd Institute @boydinst]

We just published a comprehensive piece on the US fiscal situation. Here are the charts we ran for the article, and what each of them mean...

[The Boyd Institute @boydinst]

https://t.co/3FwwYl9Eqm

[The Boyd Institute @boydinst]

Foreign banks hold trillions in dollar-denominated cross-border liabilities. The dollar is the world's offshore money — used outside America by parties unrelated to America.