Shiver, a Voodoo package is coming near you..

[stpioc]

In the James Room of the Renaissance Baltimore Harborplace Hotel, Erick Sager is demonstrating what happens when you admit that people die. Half-lit by PowerPoint, he explains that a seminal 1998 paper on the ideal level of government debt relies on an infinitely lived agent—it assumes that people are immortal.

Sager, an economist for the Bureau of Labor Statistics, speaks in surprisingly plain English. He’s added to that 1998 paper, he says, “by relaxing the assumption that people are infinitely lived.” Economists call this a “life cycle” approach, and it produces a dramatically different result. Rather than hold debt, his life cycle analysis suggests governments should hold savings. For the U.S., that’s a swing on the order of $20 trillion.

Republicans have long argued that economic growth from tax cuts should be fed back into the model, year by year. They call this approach “dynamic scoring” or “macroeconomic analysis.” For the first time, macroeconomic analysis will likely prevail in next year’s official scores for major revenue bills from the JCT. Some Democrats, who’ve been suspicious of an approach that makes tax cuts look cheaper, are slowly warming to the same idea for appropriations bills. It could make infrastructure spending look cheaper, too.

How Republicans Plan to Spend Like Crazy Without Running Up Debt - Bloomberg