President Trump mentioned a 15% annual real GDP growth target.
Progrowth Policy
Lower interest rates and accommodative monetary policy to boost borrowing, investment, and consumption.
Warsh’s perceived willingness to tolerate stronger growth without quick tightening.
Complementary policies like tax cuts, deregulation, and energy production (drill baby drill) that Trump has long advocated.
Achieving sustained 15% real annual GDP growth would require an unprecedented combination of demand stimulus and supply-side revolution.
Every Policy Would Become Pro-Growth
Monetary Policy Aggressive rate cuts (potentially to zero or below historical norms). Frameworks that prioritize employment/growth over preemptive inflation fighting. Warsh signals tolerance for higher growth.
Extend or expand tax cuts (corporate, individual, capital gains) to boost investment and consumption. Targeted incentives for R&D, manufacturing, and infrastructure. Increased government spending on strategic areas (energy, defense, AI) without excessive waste, though this widens deficits short-term.
Deregulation and Supply-Side Reforms. Rapid rollback of rules in energy, environment, finance, housing, and tech to lower costs, speed permitting, and encourage capital formation. This could unleash private investment and productivity.
Energy and Manufacturing Renaissance. Maximize abundant and cheap energy. Outlier would be space based AI solar power.
Policies accelerating AI, automation, biotech, and advanced manufacturing adoption. Public-private partnerships, immigration reform favoring high-skilled workers, and education/skills initiatives. Cheap energy + tech could drive outsized TFP (total factor productivity) gains.
World GDP has been doubling every 25 years for last 100 years even after adjusting for inflation. This means we would be expecting 3 doublings from 2025-2100. However, the world appear to be seeing changing and accelerating technology.
China had sustained GDP growth at high levels after 1978. They had 16 years 1978, 1983, 1984, 1985, 1987, 1988, 1992–1995, 2003–2007, 2010 where there was high GDP growth driven by reforms, exports, and investment. China’s overall average real GDP growth from 1979–2020 was about 8–9%. China’s GDP more than 40X from 1980 to 2020. 40 years for 10 times more growth than a “normal” 4X.
China GDP was boosted by a few hundred billion per year of foreign direct investment.
The US also had a shorter sustained period of high GDP growth. 6 years of 8-19% GDP growth. This was the world war 2 period when the US doubled production. The war mobilization was a huge period a maximum investment and increase in factories and production capacity. It was debt funded at a level of about 20-40% of GDP. There was a smaller and shorter effect for the Korean War.
If the AI data center build and in particular the AI data centers in space enables 100 GW/year and then 100 TW/year of space based solar and billions of chips and satellites for continuing a profitable scaling for decades of AI data centers.
By emulating WW2-era US mobilization but for decades or centuries, where massive investment doubled production, this could drive 18%+ annual real GDP growth. Key enablers include AI-orchestrated roboeverything systems boosting all labor (robotaxis, humanoid bots, automated logistics), digital emulation of white-collar work worth trillions, and accelerated scientific progress.
Elon Musk states full-scale space-based solar AI centers are viable in 2-3 years, powering AI more efficiently than Earth grids.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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I saw the comments about renewables and coal. Beyond just the CO2 releases Coal has ugly real time social and environmental results. Why don’t you ask a coal plant operator how many curies of radiation their stacks release and their tailings ponds contain, before even talking about heavy metals.
Renewables; too many are unsustainable vanity pieces for political mouthpieces. Reduce the ridiculous subsidies (you don’t have to completely eliminate them. To the point where non-dispatchable renewables such as on shore wind and solar have to make a business case on their own and you will have a more naturally formed market where they can be more functional and value added.
I’m aware that coal plants release more radiation than nuclear plants are legally permitted to. Same could be said of hydroelectric plants, actually, the usually omitted point is how vastly diluted it is in all three cases, scarcely if at all above background levels.
So forget about the radiation, the heavy metals actually ARE the issue with coal.
Going back to coal (you gotta love Coalie) will help while strangling green renewable energy.
Does anyone remember David Stockman? He was former President Reagan’s Director of OMB from 1981-1985 … When similar claims about the benefit of “Reganomics” did not materialize and OMB couldn’t produce the touted benefits, he got “taken to the woodshed” … “Reganomics” managed to do increase the federal debt from slightly less than 1 trillion to slightly more than 5 trillion — doing it 8 years 5 times over what it took the Democrats to do 1 time in 47 years …
Anyone remember Paul Volker? Former Federal Reserve Chairman appointed by Reagan who promised he would strangle inflation from the American economy — and did! Remember CC with 40% interest? Mortgages at 18%-20%? Remember unemployment at 12%-15%? 6 years of real pain, but it laid the basis for the incredible nearly inflation free grown of the 80s and 90s — there were other contributing factors, but Paul Volker laid the ground work …
I would very much like to see the above fantasy play out and become reality. However, color me very skeptical. I’m not going to drink the kool aid this administration is selling. It will lead the necessary repeat and enormous pane of the Volker era …
Don’t …. you … believe … it …
Only people over 65 have any memories as adults of Paul Volker, Reagan, Carter or Inflation. The large majority of adults don’t have any grasp of what the word “Inflation” even means either in the abstract in an academic sense or from experience. This is why politicians cater to the absurd misunderstanding that fighting inflation implies reversing the price increases that have already occurred and restoring prices people remember from a few years ago.
Our economy has been a tug of war between ever increasing technology, and ever more smothering regulation. That’s been at a near stalemate for decades.
If ever the rope was cut, and the regulation stopped holding the technology back, yeah, I could see double digit economic growth.
I am skeptical of the claim of a 15% annual GDP growth. Having said that, given the fact that the average annual GDP growth has been roughly 2% for the last 25 years, if Trump can swing 5 or even 6%, the GOP will be riding a big red wave into the midterms.
Any Intelligence explosion related growth will at least over the next few years be K shaped. Tech stocks up, various other assets up, inflation down, GDP up dramatically, but also unemployment up, poverty up, social unrest up, the sense of economic insecurity up dramatically. That could easily produce a big blue wave in the midterms and an even bigger one in 2028 – at the same time as 5 or 6% growth.
After reading your atrocious take on inflation as though it didn’t happen over the last five years, I can dismiss the utter nonsense you just posted.
Trump was blatantly in deep with Epstein. The Epstein papers have clearly been edited to remove any mention. The secretary of commerce lied under oath about his connection to Epstein. The attorney general was asked to apologise and responded that the Dow is an all time high, so suck it up.
In Britain the Epstein papers have almost brought down the Prime Minister, and the Royal family has taken a beating. In America, not a jot. There might be 6% growth and the voters will be happy with that.
So Trump threw Epstein out and blew the whistle in 2006, Epstein hated Trump, and there is zero in the documents to incriminate Trump — and you still say that Trump was a willing participant in Epstein’s crimes? Not to mention literal victim testimony that Trump was never involved, and had only treated her with kindness?
That sounds very much like an apriori belief that cannot be falsified in your mind. The victims deserve better than objectification as tools for political leverage.
It’s just the party line that’s being pushed in certain media. Remember that Hawaiian Tropic newspaper photo that got distributed with face redaction added, to create the impression that the contestants were some sort of victims?
Heh, hadn’t heard about that one.
Did you notice that his signature in Epstein’s ‘Birthday book’ didn’t just match his signature from the time, but looked like an almost perfect copy of one of the examples dug up by media investigators? As in, a near perfect copy excepting a single, slightly higher upstroke? I would give good odds that his signature was copied from that exact sample.
15% could mostly be done through inflation. Trump has been badgering the Fed to lower rates dramatically, well beyond what the market is pricing the 10 year Treasury bond, for a commonly used benchmark example. He barely seems to understand what “affordable” means and says it’s a liberal hoax to deflect from a booming stock market – itself partly a product of inflation. Trump needs inflation to make the notional value of the national debt less important.
This is a real GDP growth target. Growth AFTER inflation.
The major difference between today and WWII is that government during WWII was:
A. Competent and not looking to grift off the American people
B. Investing in the real economy, funding factories and even the Manhattan project, which was much more science fiction when it started than people realize today. Trump is instead throttling R&D with cuts and political restrictions (yes, DEI needs to DIE, but there are a lot of offbeat people who won’t get a chance to thrive and produce great things because of his prejudices).
C. Real world goal oriented: convert car factories to fighter plane and tank factories, for example. Did FDR ever boast about a rising stock market during bursts of rebound in the Great Depression? No. Trump boasts about the stock market all the time and its decline influences his policies too. Not saying it shouldn’t because SOMETHING needs to rein in his destructive tariffs – remember Smoot-Hawley? AI and a few Musk type super-producers will help replace competent government, but why aren’t there more of them? Oh yeah, Trump is slashing funding for education and loves “the poorly educated” too.
It’s a completely different environment today – oh, and he’s anti-environment and pro-pollution too. A lot of waste and environmental harms was done in WWII as well, but the population and resource depletion was orders of magnitude smaller too, so the damage was restricted.
Even China, with strong doses of A, B, and C above, can’t achieve more than 5% GDP growth after inflation nowadays, with a shrinking population. AI and robots will replace the lost humans; I’m not worried about China. But no major economy is getting much above 5% GDP growth without inflation sustainably. Maybe some small third world countries can for a few years, but they start from a very low base.
Not a chance. Even China, with 1/10th the regulation we have, doesn’t have double digit growth.
So how do we get to this while totally dismantling ideas like NRx and dark enlightenment? O_o Since doing that is the only path forward to achieve abundance for all.