Early in the debt-ceiling fight, Speaker Kevin McCarthy declared, “A responsible debt limit increase that begins to eliminate wasteful Washington spending and puts us on a path towards a balanced budget is not only the right place to start, it’s the only place to start.”

But the deal that passed the House and is set for Senate approval wouldn’t get us anywhere close to this goal. It will still leave the nation with $18.8 trillion in cumulative deficits over the next decade, according to data from the Congressional Budget Office. The projected debt of $46.7 trillion by 2033 will still be $45.2 trillion. This is assuming that the spending levels in the deal are not undone by future Congresses, as was the case in the past. In fact, the restraints negotiated to resolve the 2011 debt-ceiling standoff were blown up in 2018 with Republicans in control of the White House and both chambers of Congress. McCarthy was one of the lawmakers who voted to do so.

To be clear, I’m not saying McCarthy could have realistically negotiated a better deal in this debt-ceiling fight, with such a narrow majority in the House and a Democratic-controlled Senate. But McCarthy has only himself to blame for raising the prospect of putting the nation on a path to a balanced budget, which helped fuel the unrealistic expectations in the first place. Republican leaders have a history of doing this. Just look at how Republicans campaigned on repealing Obamacare through four election cycles, only to chastise conservatives for ideological purity during the 2017 negotiations when those conservatives had the temerity to insist on full repeal rather than a haphazardly watered-down version of Obamacare.

Ultimately, the only way to get the U.S. on a responsible fiscal trajectory is to overhaul entitlements, including Medicare and Social Security. And on that front, Republicans have shown no resolve to do anything about it.