The case against a collapse in 2024

This comes from Karl Denninger:
The immediate problem we face is that by 2024 at present trends Medicare will not be able to pay. To try to pay will cause the federal deficit to roughly DOUBLE on an instant basis. We will have a roughly $5 trillion budget at that point BUT ONLY BE COLLECTING $3 TRILLION in revenues, and this assumes NO RECESSION! Ha! You're going to get one all right, and it's going to be monstrous; we MIGHT actually see $5 trillion spend on TWO trillion in revenue, or a roughly sixty percent deficit ratio. https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=236403

I thought that Medicare was supposed to last until 2026 and even then the deficit would only be $50 billion per year, but I haven't read the most recent 2019 report available here:  https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Statistics-Trends-and-Reports/ReportsTrustFunds/index.html  So someone (me) should read this and summarize it.

And I thought that that US wouldn't see a $2 trillion deficit until 2036 based on current projections. And in that year revenue would be $7.7 trillion and expenditures $9.7 trillion so a $2 trillion deficit doesn't sound so bad with those numbers.  But I also thought that we wouldn't see a $1 trillion deficit until 2022 and with the new budget deal this will happen next year, in 2020.  So we need to wait and see what the new budget deal actually is, and see how CBO scores it, and then critique that.

I also haven't factored in a recession, since I am basically using CBO's numbers and extending them and they haven't factored in a recession.  I am basically assuming a 4% growth in nominal GDP forever. The thing to do would be to look at the last few recessions and see how much revenue dropped as a percent from the previous years.

So for now, I am going to assume that the Good Times will Roll and call Karl a kook.  But I will also take a look at it again in six months or so.