No, that's called...math. The US government fiscal math hasn't mathed in a long time.

It's not called math. Math requires that over the long term, the amount raised and the amount spent have to match. It doesn't say which one has to change. The Grover Norquist delusion is that if you cause a massive imbalance by having big tax cuts, that imbalance will eventually be corrected by having big spending cuts. But that's wrong. If you cause a massive imbalance by having big tax cuts, it will result in big deficits and debt - and those big deficits and debt will eventually be corrected by undoing the tax cuts. Not by cutting spending.

I don't think you're grokking the current state of the government's finances. Our debt service is > the defense budget. Non-discretionary spending is on a trajectory that's not sustainable. The more money we print, the more we devalue the dollar and the more inflationary pressure gets put on the economy.

I grok the current state of the government's finances. I just disagree with you about what's going to change. We can't keep printing money without inflation - but that's why we're going to have stop printing the money and start increasing government tax receipts. Painful medicine, but less painful than the alternative.

My point isn't about whether circumstances will require a change in the government's finances. Just which half of the government's finances is likely to be changed, given the politics of the situation. You seem to think it's "cutting popular government programs." I think it's "raising taxes a few percentage points, concentrated among the well-off."

You're going to see how "popular" paying for these services remains once people realize they can't pay for their own lives any longer, when they realize that they're not able to go on vacation like they used to or they can't retire for 5 more years or they find themselves working more and more and spending less time with their families just to maintain a worsening lifestyle.

Why would any of that happen? Again, we're not talking about going back to 80-90% top marginal rates. Having a top rate of 39.6% instead of 35% is not going to cause people to "not be able to pay for their own lives" or "not be able to retire for five 5 more years." I won't pretend it's not painful and will be politically unpopular - but it will be far less unpopular than materially cutting Social Security or Medicare. Pointing to things like Defund the Police that were always broadly unpopular (the "elite leftist set" picking the wrong side of an 80/20 issue) doesn't give you any insight into how people will react to changes in a program that is massively popular (keeping Social Security and Medicare protected from cuts is definitely the 80 side of the 80/20 issue).

Again, I think this is just fantasy. You honestly think that the Democrats will vote to cut Social Security before voting to raise taxes?