Our Addiction To Deficit Spending Is The Greatest Threat To Our Future Prosperity | Lyn Alden

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**Lyn Alden** (0:58)
The large deficits in general are stimulatory. So the fact that money is pouring out in the economy through Social Security, Medicare, Defense, that goes to seniors and their consumer spending, that goes to the health care sector and their workers and their spending, that goes to the defense sector, their contractors, their employees, all of their personal spending, interest expense, that does kind of pour out in the economy and stimulate certain parts of it. So the challenge here is that to actually cut those bigger four, it actually is, there's unpopular decisions to be made.

**Adam Taggart** (1:35)
Welcome to Thoughtful Money. I'm its founder and your host, Adam Taggart. Today's guest has long been warning that the US., as well as many other countries, is now in an era of fiscal dominance. That's when fiscal spending gets out of control, like a runaway train. It becomes so large that it becomes the primary determinant of economic growth and inflation, steamrolling over any impact of monetary policy or private sector lending. At the time of this recording, the deficit for the 2025 US fiscal year is on track to be the third largest in history, only behind the COVID emergency spending years of 2020 and 2021 The key difference, of course, is that this time we're not facing a global pandemic and economic lockdown. Yet the profligate deficit spending continues unabated. What impact is this having on the economy, asset prices, our currencies, purchasing power, and social stability? For answers, we're very fortunate to welcome back to the program Lyn Alden, investment strategist and author of the book, Broken Money, Why Our Financial System Is Failing Us, and How We Can Make It Better. Lyn, thanks so much for joining us today.

**Lyn Alden** (2:43)
Thanks for having me back. Always happy to be here.

**Adam Taggart** (2:45)
Thank you, Lyn. I very much appreciate that. And look, we're going to get into it as cover as much territory as we can today. But I'm going to let folks know that one topic that we're not going to address today, because we're going to address it in depth at the upcoming Thoughtful Money Conference that you are speaking at, we're going to reserve your thoughts on Bitcoin and Crypto for that conference. But folks, yes, Lyn is returning as one of the esteemed faculty members for our online conference. Again, that's coming up on Saturday, October 18th, so it's just a few weeks away. Again, we'll be diving deep into her thoughts on Bitcoin and Crypto, and there's lots to talk about there right now. If you haven't got your ticket yet, just go to thoughtfulmoney.com/conference and buy your ticket there now and buy it there soon, so you get the lowest early bird price discount we're offering while it's still around. All right, Lyn, I was thinking about how to kick off this discussion with you, and was looking back at your book and realizing, I think we're pretty much coming up on the two-year anniversary of that book being published. So I'm curious, have things unfolded since then pretty much as you expected, or have there been any things along the way that have surprised you?

**Lyn Alden** (3:56)
So they have. Yeah, we're at where we just passed a two-year mark and it's certainly been a fun ride. I purposely wrote the book in such a way to make it as timeless as possible. So instead of predicting what's going to happen one year, two year, three years out, it was basically really high level view of what money is, how technology changes structures of money and power over time, and how things could look like years and decades in the future, and what the big branching decision points are.