29 Ways Out of the Fiscal Trap
The debt-and-deficits essay contest wiki — winners to be announced next week
The essay contest closed on July 15 and judging is underway! We asked how America escapes its fiscal trap, got twenty-nine answers, and thought it would be cool to share them all via a post. So here is the whole field, grouped by what each submission proposes. The grouping is ours, and neither that nor the ordering signals anything about the outcome.
The spending side
Brian Moore, Project Hail Mary Zero — The federal government is a health insurance plan that happens to own an army, and type 2 diabetes and its downstream diseases are the largest item. So metabolic disease is fiscal policy: free GLP-1 drugs for anyone diabetic or pre-diabetic, an end to corn and soy subsidies, and hospice good enough to choose.
Performative Bafflement, Achieving fiscal solvency by not letting private equity bros torture grandma to death — Roughly 70% of federal spending on identifiable groups goes to the elderly, concentrated in the final years of life, and private-equity-owned nursing homes already deliver worse care at higher cost. He proposes two voluntary exits after 65: one trading a do-not-resuscitate order for unrestricted access to drugs and risk, the other a paid assisted-dying program on the Canadian model.
Eli Sheets, “Staying Is Nowhere” (submitted as PDF1) — No single measure closes the gap, so stack the ones that survive a vote: Social Security reshaped along the EITC’s phase-out curve, a smaller federal share of the Medicaid expansion, a credit paying seniors to leave Medicare Advantage, restored IRS auditing. He catches what such lists miss — those seniors cannot buy Medigap after 65, so the credit needs an enrollment window attached.
Fractal Inklings, The Generational Deal — Medicare Advantage plans are paid more for sicker patients, giving them a reason to record patients as sicker than they are. Ending that overpayment closes most of Medicare’s $193 billion hospital-fund shortfall with nobody losing coverage, buying time for the larger trade: a sovereign wealth fund paying out as citizen accounts, and Medicaid devolved to the states.
S.B. Orson, What If We Just… Bought Our Way Out? — Nobody votes to lose a benefit, but people will sell one. Pay every American 30% of the present value of their lifetime benefits in Treasury bonds, abolish Social Security, Medicare, and FICA, and replace delivery with at-cost government clinics, catastrophic Medicaid, and a civilian medic corps.
Deion A. Kathawa, Bariatric surgery for Leviathan, STAT! — Congress will not diet, so remove its capacity to overeat: repealing the Sixteenth Amendment eliminates 51% of federal revenue, enough for discretionary spending and interest but not entitlements, forcing cuts no legislature would pass.
Grant Varner, How Does America Escape Its Fiscal Trap? — Federal money props up the price of whatever it buys, and Medicare’s open-ended design turns every advance in medicine into a larger bill, so phase the benefits down and move people onto 401(k)s and HSAs.
Deflated Man, A Social Security Severance for Workers in the age of an AI-Bolstered Workforce — A firm can deduct the software that replaces a worker while the worker’s payroll taxes disappear, so tax AI productivity gains to backfill Social Security, and let under-40s cash out at $15,000 to $90,000.
S. de Erney, Punt to the People on Social Security Reform — Congress cannot cast a vote that raises taxes or cuts benefits, but a referendum can settle it without producing a losing side. Put both on a national ballot and close the 75-year gap in proportion to the result: 40% for higher payroll taxes closes 40% that way, slower benefit growth the rest.
Erek Tinker, Gerontocracy and Its Discontents — A generation that had few children now draws on a smaller working cohort, and eldercare has become a leading growth industry. Coverage starting at 65 with nothing before it leaves the young carrying untreated illness for decades.
The revenue side
Nathan Smith, Welcome and Tax Mass Immigration to Escape America’s Fiscal Trap — Admit roughly 200 million immigrant workers and charge for entry through visa fees, licensing surcharges, and income surtaxes, with benefits restricted to citizens. The added labor roughly doubles GDP and the migration taxes compensate native workers in cash, so the wage effects get paid off rather than denied.
Malevitis, Fixing the Deficit without Bankrupting the Young — A VAT taxes spending, which falls hardest on the young; a land value tax falls on landowners, who are disproportionately the retirees drawing the benefits. A 5.6% tax on the $32 trillion of non-federal land covers the deficit, phased in over twelve years, with payment deferrable until sale.
Harsh Bhudolia, How America Escapes Its Fiscal Trap: Fifteen Doors Out — Foreigners pay large sums for American degrees, visas, and market access, and almost none of it reaches the Treasury. Capture it through auctioned residency slots, visa surcharges, a paid immigration fast-track, and a remittance tax, with every dollar locked in a debt-retirement fund.
Quy Ma, The Velocity Problem — Tax revenue comes from transactions, and forty years of capital gains preferences and stepped-up basis have taught capital to sit still. Tax gains by whether the asset was put to work rather than how long it was held.
Synthetic Civilization, The Tax State Reads Wages. It Cannot Read Compute. — The government funds itself through payroll withholding, which works only because wages are visible and countable, and AI shifts production into forms with no wage line to read. The state is going blind. Levy a small charge on AI training and inference, where output is already metered, and return it as payroll tax cuts.
The Old Continent, Stocks, Flows and Fiscal Madness — Government deficits are matched dollar for dollar by surpluses elsewhere, so cutting the deficit takes money off someone’s balance sheet — take it from foreign holders and corporate cash rather than households, through a wealth tax and buyback taxation.
Mike Alexander, How to balance the federal budget — Restoring pre-1997 tax rates and applying FICA to all income, investment income included, closes the gap arithmetically. He traces where it came from — Social Security up 2.4% of GDP since 1966, Medicare up 3.5%, Part D and Medicare Advantage passed without revenue — then retires interest with platinum coins.
Build a national asset
Todd Wohling, A US Sovereign Wealth Fund as a Foil to US Debt — An asset can be accumulated faster than $39 trillion can be paid down: seed a Norway-style fund with repatriated tax-haven assets and a 1% financial transactions tax, spend 4% a year, and cover Social Security by year fifteen, Medicare by year thirty.
Abdulganiyy Abdulwasiu Olanrewaju, “The Growth Covenant” (submitted as PDF2) — The worker-to-retiree ratio has fallen from 5:1 in 1960 toward 2.5:1 by 2040, so raise the number of workers rather than cut benefits. Entrench three things constitutionally: skills-weighted immigration that expands with the fiscal gap, a fiscal commission that enforces rather than recommends, and conversion of debt above 70% of GDP into growth-linked securities.
Change who decides
The Mont Pelerin Review, How Do We Solve a Crisis Very Few People Care About — Voters have no incentive to inform themselves about the debt and politicians have every incentive to add to it, so change who holds the veto: a fourth branch of bondholders able to block any bill that worsens it, or elections weighted toward informed voters.
No Hot Takes, The Fiscal Cliff Crisis Isn’t An Accounting Problem — Every available fix imposes concentrated losses on an organized group — AARP’s 38 million members, the drug and hospital lobbies, bondholders — and representative government exists to prevent that. The reforms that did happen ran three things at once: a frontman with standing to absorb blame, a technocratic team working out of view, and enough spectacle to hold attention elsewhere while it lands. He grades Reagan, Thatcher, and the city receiverships on it, and reads 2028 as a casting problem.
Reid, We’re not going to solve the debt crisis — Nothing gets fixed before the crisis arrives, so the useful work now is putting a capable president in office ready to act when it does. His revenue proposal is a neoprotectorate: a country cedes resource rights and a share of future growth for American protection and contract enforcement.
Alan Schmidt, Unleash the Soldier of Fortune and Slash the Deficit — Cuts are blocked and tax increases suppress the growth needed to outrun the debt, so the remaining revenue lies in what is currently prohibited: “innovation exceptions” letting a business pay a higher rate for exemption from a named regulation, contractors licensed to run badly governed resource states, and asteroid mining.
The money itself
Nick Manteris, Fifty-Five Years and Zero Reversals — Productivity is up 178% since 1971 and real wages are up 10%, and much of the difference went into health premiums rather than paychecks: per-person health spending rose from about 100 hours of labor in 1970 to nearly 500 today. Cutting spending only moves the gap onto households.
Grace M. Lo Porto, “The Dollar, the Petrodollar, Gold, Tariffs, and How To Escape The Fiscal Trap” (submitted as PDF3) — The debt is larger than the entire money supply, so no schedule of taxation retires it and inflation is the only instrument left. Issue a second electronic currency denominated in grams of gold, so the dollar can be inflated to clear the debt while savings hold value.
Mizanur Rahman, Ph.D., Will Deglobalization, Reciprocal Tariffs and Sanctions Resolve U.S. Payment Imbalances? — America’s external deficit comes from saving less than it invests and from supplying the reserve currency, so tariffs relocate it without shrinking it. Closing it takes coordination: surplus countries appreciate on a schedule and expand health and pension provision, while the US saves more at home.
Outside the categories
AG Johnson, Twenty-Five (Mostly) Terrible Ideas to Fix America’s Debt Problem — Neither party will cut spending unilaterally without losing the next election, which leaves a bipartisan Simpson-Bowles-style commission as the only mechanism that survives contact with democracy. He gets there through twenty-five worse options.
Joel Jones , Deficits and Moonbeams — Any reform should leave the country no worse off if it fails or gets reversed, which disqualifies most of the sharper proposals on offer. Stop freezing foreign assets so the dollar keeps its role, halve the military, protect Social Security by taxing a wider band of income, and pass Medicare for All, since employer-based insurance was a wartime accident and much of its cost is billing rather than care.
Annoying Peasant, DOGE, Done Right — Both goals everyone assumes are wrong: the debt never needs paying off and the budget never needs balancing, only deficits held below nominal growth, around 3% of GDP. Getting a third of the way there takes no new law — quadruple the GAO's budget and make its recommendations binding within two years unless an agency formally challenges them, and restore the IRS to 1990s funding and audit rates to collect the roughly $600 billion a year already owed.
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Comment and let us know which ones are your favorites! And stay tuned for the announcement of the winners around the end of the month.
