Modern democracy, with universal suffrage, always goes bankrupt over time.
Why?
Because closely-contested votes are determined by swing voters, which means voters who are easily swayed. There don't have to be a lot of them. Two percent will do, because two percent is the difference between 49% and 51%.
This has two first-order effects.
First of all, it strips consistent voters of political representation. If you are part of a group that consistently votes Purple, then the Greens won't offer you anything, but neither will the Purples, because they not only don't have to, but because they have to focus their efforts on the swing voters.
Secondly, you end up in a situation where the best, and the only viable, political strategy is "bribe swing voters".
Elections, at this point, are no longer a contest of ideas, or a debate over the best interests of the nation. They are an auction, where minorities with X amount of votes collectively negotiate their sale to political parties for Y amount of taxpayer dollars.
So, neither party is fiscally responsible. They can't be. To be fiscally responsible is to lose. What this means is that government spending is a ratchet... it only turns one way, increasing but never decreasing.
Even those who would love to cut spending can't. Instead, they have to try to accumulate political power so they can, which means spending money to bribe swing voters.
They end up kicking the can down the road simply because the system effectively forbids anything else.
The second-order effect of this is that the nation moves inevitably towards bankruptcy.
Why? Because you cannot increase taxes forever. Up to a point, increasing taxes increases the money you get from taxing. But then you reach a point where increasing taxes actually gets you less, because you taxed people too much, and now they don't have as much for you to take.
(It's called the Laffer Curve, but when you get there, no one is laughing.)
But then you have to spend less, right? Because you have less?
Wrong. When you get to the top of the Laffer Curve, you have to keep spending because the reality of elections won't allow anything else.
So you print money.
But what you don't realize, or maybe you do, but you have no choice, is that inflation is also a tax.
A 5% annual inflation rate is a 5% flat tax. But it's not a 5% flat tax on income, it's a 5% flat tax on total net worth. It's taking 5% of every dollar-denominated asset, every year.
And since it is a tax, it moves you up the Laffer Curve in the same way. It makes your society poorer, your direct tax revenue less, and also reduces your effective income from printing money because your currency is worth less now.
This can happen very fast if you live in Zimbabwe, and your politicians all have double-digit IQs and don't understand any of this.
Or it can happen slowly because in you live in America and your politicians do understand this, they just have no choice.
But it always happens, because the ratchet only moves in one direction. The amount of money that universal democracies eventually spend is "all there is".
@elonmusk found out about this with DOGE. He worked his ass off finding hundreds of billions to cut from the budget, but he was surprised and dismayed when that money was not actually cut from the federal budget, just traded away for political capital.
Which was, in fact, always the plan.
Because in a universal democracy, there is no political path to budget cuts.
He then expressed the hope that if we cannot tame the devouring monster, we could simply leverage emerging technologies like AI, robotics, and space capitalism to increase productivity and stay ahead of the monster's appetite.
But you can't. Because universal democracies don't devour a fixed percent of society wealth. They devour All There Is.
You can't appease All There Is. You can't satiate it or satisfy it. You can't put it on a diet.
And you can never shut it down with the political process, because swing voters control elections, and they will never allow anyone who does this to retain the political power to keep doing it.
The ratchet only spins one direction.
This means that a political collapse is inevitable. But not all political collapses are the same. Some political collapses are the Supreme Soviet voting to dissolve itself. Others are a Rwandian Machete Party.
The trick is that when the normies finally realize they are being taxed to death, and are ready for a change, there need to be new leaders who understand that the problem is not the budget, the problem is universal suffrage.
Leaders who are willing to ignore the usual collection of abstract-principle wankers cheeping out "Who decides?" like a small trained birds.
Because somebody has to decide. Look where not-deciding got us.