It's really fun for me to see so many opinions I used to have, like support for a fixed exchange rate with gold (gold standard).
It ain't gonna happen; and I'm no longer sure it should.

There are two big advantages of a Rep Pres creating a big deficit. First, it's hard for the Dems to want even more deficit, and the problems of a deficit can be used by the Reps to oppose bad Dem spending. Second, less of it is wasted on domestic entitlement consumption, which leads to calls for even more and usually reduces incentives to be productive.

Instead it is more often wasted on accumulating more and higher quality weapons -- which it is hoped to not actively use. In a war, these are not so wasted. The total economic costs & benefits of war have to include the C & B of the alternative non-war scenario, too, for comparison. It's not clear to me that the prolly negative C&B of war are more or less negative than the prolly negative C&B of non-war (now). (Of course I really mean the expected value based on probabilities of various outcomes and valuations of those outcomes.)

The economy will have an increasingly tough time to grow as in the 90s, since the big Baby Boom Retirement Bomb is now "on the radar screen", plus the boomers themselves are at or past their productive prime (age 45?).

There ain't gonna be enough money to repay all that was paid in, much less more than was paid in (as Soc. Sec. has mostly been working so far). But fixing SS isn't a winning issue for anybody. It might not get fixed