 John Kerry ran on $2 trillion over 10 years. Barack Obama ran on $1 trillion. Hillary 2 trillion. Joe Biden ran on $11 trillion. It's all but inevitable that Donald Trump, who signed off on a record-busting federal budget of $6.6 trillion, will be replaced in the White House by Joe Biden, who's promising more new spending than any other president in history to fund a platform that the Washington Post called more liberal than that of every past Democratic nominee. Oh, this is the Bolsheviks versus the Mensheviks. You know, I mean, yes, the Mensheviks are the moderates, but I mean, we're all so far to the left right now. It used to be a trillion-dollar policy would shock people, and now a trillion-dollar policy gets laughed at for being insufficient. Brian Riedel is a budget analyst at the Manhattan Institute who closely watches how much the federal government spends and how much it adds to the national debt. The deficit's not going to come back below a trillion dollars again, I don't believe. Large and growing federal spending reduces long-term economic growth and crowds out private investment. But Riedel says another major problem is that the increases will simply soak up too much of government spending. Let's just look at the interest cost. Right now, interest rates are low, but if interest rates spike, the interest costs could absolutely destroy the federal budget. For every point interest rates rise, it costs about one and a half or two trillion dollars over the decade. Over the next 30 years, even if interest rates stay low, the principal gets so big. So then, at a certain point, the bond market gets nervous, they see the debt rising that much, and they start to demand higher interest rates. CBO says that by 2050, the GDP will be $6,000 lower per capita than if we stabilize the national debt. $6,000 per capita, just from the economy growing more slowly because the savings are going to the government for spending rather than businesses for investment. Riedel doesn't see Biden rising to the challenge of reining and spending, especially on old-age entitlements such as Medicare and Social Security that are ultimately driving automatic budget increases. There's one of two paths to fixing this. Number one, you need a Ross Perot kind of person who comes and gets everybody motivated about it. I don't see that on the horizon right now because Democrats don't want to touch these programs and Republicans increasingly don't want to touch these programs because their working-class base is more dependent on them. If that's the case, you need the economy to force action. If the economy starts to get sluggish, interest rates start to rise, the bond market gets nervous, that's what can force action. The problem is, by that point, you're already kind of beginning a fiscal crisis and you have a lot less wiggle room and you have to be a lot more drastic, which is why I would love for there to be somebody who can motivate people to take this seriously now, but you know how things go in democracies. You usually wait until there's a crisis and then do something drastic. Riedel says one piece of good news from the 2020 election is that Biden will have trouble enacting much of his budget-busting agenda. I am more optimistic than I was when I thought the Democrats were going to run the table. With a split government, you're not going to see that much change from the baseline. I think in the short term, you're going to get more pandemic aid, more recession aid, not nearly the $3 trillion the Democrats want, but maybe another trillion dollars over the next year or so. From there, President Trump is campaigned on $2 trillion in infrastructure. Joe Biden campaigned on $2 trillion in infrastructure. There might be a bipartisan infrastructure deal at some point. The next four years under split government may be a pretty quiet four years from a policy level. But hitting the snooze bar on new spending won't save us from the fiscal nightmare that lies ahead. The Overton window has shifted so far. Bernie Sanders ran on $97 trillion over 10 years. Elizabeth Warren ran on $45 trillion over 10 years. And so all of a sudden, Biden's a moderate.