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we can even reach a point where we start paying down the debt. This is called the power of compounding. What a change that would be from a trillion dollars a year in red ink added forever — which is the Biden baseline.

This also means that any policy that lowers growth — for example, not drilling for U.S. oil and gas — makes the deficit forecast worse.

This is why tax increases on investment and

work are so counterproductive. Those taxes would reduce investment and growth and make a balanced budget even more unachievable. Under President Bill Clinton, we had fast growth, spending restraint, and a booming stock market; three years later, we had a balanced budget.

What if our politicians set a national priority to do everything humanly possible to make the economy grow at between 3% and 3.5%, not the anemic growth rate of that pace as the CBO predicts? Many people think that’s impossible because of low birth rates and low labor force growth, but we can and should import the workers we need — especially the brainiacs — from the rest of the world to keep labor force growth from shrinking.

We can achieve bursts of growth from the next age of hypertechnological advances in areas like energy production, robotics, artificial intelligence, and gene therapy that could make the internet revolution look like a blip. New billion-dollar factories will be filled with very fewer workers and a lot of robots — which translates into gigantic leaps forward in productivity that could make 3% growth a layup.

There is one more virtue of a growth agenda: Americans want prosperity far more than they want a balanced budget. We all want a balanced federal budget in principle, but more important to voters is that their own family budget is growing.

Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a chief economist at Freedom Works. His latest book is: “Govzilla: How the Relentless Growth of Government is Devouring our Economy.” COPYRIGHT 2023 CREATORS. COM