Vermont secessionists utterly reject the infinite growth paradigm as a key to the future, just as we led the opposition to the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, the national embargo of 1807, and the War of 1812. New England secessionists also expressed their opposition to a military draft at the Hartford Convention of 1814. Abolitionists in New England urged northern states to disengage from the Union.

What we have in common is a commitment to sustainable economic development, local food & energy production, to bring home the Vermont Guard troops from Afghanistan and Iraq, and to return Vermont to our status as an independent republic as we were until 1791.

However, starting with Johnson in 1967-68, the deficits began to build, and except for a couple of low deficit years mixed in, the U.S. ran deficits of about 3-7% of GDP every year up until the late 1990s when the dotcom bubble finally gave us two brief years of surplus. After that, it was back to big deficits.

In other words, we haven’t been eliminating deficits even in years of robust economic growth, and we’ve been running up huge deficits during downturns. That math is simply not sustainable in the long term because it is impossible to grow an already-developed economy that much to trim an amount equal to 4-5% of the GDP from the deficit every year. Yes, enough growth would solve everything, but so would a magic wand. Unfortunately, I’m about as likely to wake up and find a magic wand in my hand as we are to see the economy sustain 3.5% growth every year for the next decade or two. The United States was only able to sustain that growth post-WW2 thanks to brimming pension funds and the Social Security trust. Pension funds provided huge piles of money for corporations to reinvest, and Social Security provided the same for government spending. Now, however, we have to start paying that pension money back, which means that it will no longer be there to invest. Without all of the money that helped fuel post-WW2 investment, where is the growth going to come from? Quite simply, it’s not going to come from anywhere. As long as we have an aging population, the U.S. is going to see a tepid economy that will be lucky to average 2% growth every year. In fact, in about 10 years, we will be lucky to see 1% growth per year, and average growth dropping that low will send deficit and debt projections spiraling in the wrong direction.