Two essays argued there's a tradeoff GDP can't see: a society's power to take up the new against the debt that freezes it. I measured debt as the amount owed; it pointed the wrong way. The tax isn't the debt's size but whether a shock can end you, and America's thin spot is skills, not a fragile balance sheet.
GDP and the balance sheet book the loan, the payment, the house, all of it as strength: the account holds the debt on the asset's side. The freedom it takes away shows up nowhere. That gap is the flexibility tax, and the society carrying less of it is the more adaptable one.
Four companies spent more than $380 billion building the machines for the future last year. Almost no one can use it yet. We fund what we can measure, the machine, and strand what we can't, the person's crossing to a new trade, and then we book the person's debt as their wealth.