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The Fiscal Architecture of American Decline: Debt, Deficits, and Structural Impossibility

The United States fiscal trajectory is not a policy failure or a partisan choice. It is the structural consequence of an infrastructure transition in which FIRE-dominant economic architecture systematically shifted tax incidence from capital to labor-corporations fell from 31 percent to 9 percent of federal revenue between 1946 and 2023; payroll taxes rose from 8 percent to 36 percent over the same period-while the winning coalition's private-goods benefits expanded and public investment contracted. The result is a fiscal architecture that simultaneously finances the winning coalition's asset positions (federal debt at $28.2 trillion generates $950 billion in annual interest payments, 56 percent of which flows to the Elite and Chamber GOP coalitions) and structurally forecloses the public investment that would address the binding constraints documented in Papers P5 and P6. Federal government productive activities declined from 54 percent of noninterest spending in 1970 to 24 percent in 2023. CBO projects net interest will consume 23 percent of the federal budget by 2054, crowding out every discretionary program. The OASI trust fund depletes around 2033-2034 on current trajectory, at which point Social Security benefits face an automatic 21-23 percent cut-falling most heavily on the MAGA coalition that is the program's largest electoral constituency. […]