To have a permanent ever growing deficit is a different story. Combine this with the decrease in the bargaining power of the US government, and the deficit gets dropped into private companies that have no interest in the economic wellbeing of the average person but only of the wellbeing of themselves and their shareholders.
The military is rife with contractors that squeeze US taxpayer's funds dry and laugh all the way to the bank as they carry off boatloads of money.
The healthcare system is rife with companies that set their prices multiples of what every other nation sets them at and sell the lie that "insurance will cover it anyways". The people paying are the American taxpayers.
The government is getting squeezed and it does nothing. It is time for that to change. For it is the people and the government that have power to set the terms. We gave our power away, but that doesn't mean we cannot start fighting for our rights now.
The solution to the deficit is to take all the money wasted helping rich people get richer and invest it into getting the average person richer.
When the average person has spending power they buy more things, they sustain and grow the economy, they innovate, they carry out small scale projects that improve their life and the life of their neighborhood.
The average person doesn't seek to monopolize a market and increase prices for everyone. If anything, they use their time to make people's lives better.
The US government has a choice to either descend towards the middle ages, into an inflexible, anti-innovation, anti prosperity environment, ruled by a few oligarchs or to start investing in the average person.
No amount of AI or anything else will bring back the bargaining power the US government has handed the companies that now own it and decide its policies. It, and the American people, will need to mount a large and sustained struggle against them if they want to claw back their own power.
And when the average person has power, everyone is more prosperous, including the companies at the top. They get better talent, fresher ideas, more innovation. Though often they refuse to see this truth out of their own fears of competition and desire to keep serving monopolistic mediocrity.