 When President Biden took office, the deficit over the next ten years was expected to be about $12.2 trillion, thanks to a boatload of new spending approved during Biden's first year that's climbed to $14.5 trillion. One way or another that shortfall has to be accounted for by cutting spending, raising taxes, or printing money. So what does the new Inflation Reduction Act do to address the problem? It doesn't cut unnecessary spending or wasteful government programs, it raises taxes. And those tax increases will only reduce the deficit by about $300 billion, or 2% of planned borrowing over the next ten years. In other words, even assuming no new spending, we'd still need about 50 more bills just like this one to not add any more debt in the next decade. And the bill doesn't do anything to reduce the $30 trillion in debt we've already accumulated. Even that small amount of deficit reduction requires a massive corporate tax increase that will hurt the economy. There's also a plan to squeeze more money out of taxpayers by hiring 87,000 new IRS agents and beefing up the agency's audit powers. It's true that this bill is the first major piece of legislation to move through Congress that would have even a slightly positive impact on future federal deficits since at least the middle of the Obama years, but it's not a serious attempt to grapple with our coming fiscal nightmare. The actual driver of future deficits are entitlement programs. Social security and Medicare in particular are expected to bring up massive budget deficits over the next decade because they're structured like a Ponzi scheme in which today's workers are paying the benefits of today's beneficiaries. As baby boomers age and there aren't enough working age Americans to cover what they're owed, the system is starting to collapse. Yes, $300 billion might sound like a lot of money, but in the context of government spending under Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden, and the exploding cost of elder care entitlements, it's actually not very much money at all.