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I Asked A.I. to Balance America’s Budget
Its response was surprisingly simple
This weekend, Moody’s became the third credit rating agency, after Standard & Poor’s and Fitch, to downgrade U.S. debt from AAA-rated to Aa1. The danger of this downgrade is that it may become more expensive for the federal government to borrow money. That means interest on the national debt will eat up an increasingly large share of the annual budget, crowding out other priorities.
Moody’s said it was downgrading U.S. treasury bills due to both political parties’ consistent inability to get America’s financial house in order. Nor have Trump and Republicans done anything to change course. The non-partisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that Trump’s “big, beautiful” tax bill would add more than $3 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.
The last time America had a budget surplus was 2001, at the end of Bill Clinton’s term. Since then, Republican presidents Bush and Trump have both exploded the deficit with massive tax cuts and spending increases. Obama and Biden both cut the deficit in half relative to their predecessors, but neither managed to produce a surplus.
Is balancing the federal budget really so hard? I was skeptical, so I decided to ask Claude, Anthropic’s flagship LLM, to give me some ideas.
