Doug Burgum

And in my perfect world, which never happens, we would go through this big CapEx boom.

And then sometime in 26, the CapEx boom would hand off to a productivity boom.

You mean the AI boom?

Well, look, we've seen throughout history that technology can drive these things.

If you go back, I'll talk about the ones I was around for.

I was not around for the railroads.

But I used to teach economic history.

1880s, 1890s, the railroads made it 10 times faster to cross the United States.

We had this incredible productivity boom.

It was the gigantic GDP growth and it was disinflationary.

So imagine you're having double digit GDP numbers and inflation was minus two, minus three, minus 4% just because the costs were coming down.

Then in the 1980s, under Reagan, we had what I would call a deregulatory boom, because hard for everyone in this room to remember, but everything used to be regulated.

Price of airline tickets, telephone bills, banking services.

So 1980s, we had a deregulatory boom.

Paul Volcker brought down inflation, but it was also the deregulation.

1990s, which I previously mentioned, we had had a electronic buildup, and then finally it kicked in, especially in office work, and that led to a big productivity boom, and we paid down the national debt.

We had a surplus.

We had a surplus, and I mean, it seems crazy.

I found a paper the other day that people were wondering, well, what are we going to do if there aren't any government bonds?

There are plenty of government bonds.