Nothing clears a room faster than a fiscal crisis column — and yet, in the immortal words of Whitesnake, here I go again.

The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that Wall Street is "sounding the alarm" on Washington's debt and spending addictions, and that "this time, it's worth listening."

Spoiler: It was always worth listening.

Hedge-fund manager Ray Dalio (and author of "How Countries Go Broke") told Bloomberg that the U.S. has "three years, give or take a year," to get its spending under control or suffer a "heart attack." Bond markets will demand higher and higher interest rates for increasingly risky U.S. debt.

Carol Roth warned of a "double supernova" on X yesterday. "We are on the precipice of a reset of the global financial order AND we are on the cusp of a possible tech upheaval via AI," potentially resulting in massive job losses, at least in the short-to-medium term.

"Americans having to deal with one of those is a once-in-a-lifetime shock; both is unfathomable," Roth concluded.

Even a relative debt dove like Peter Orszag — President Barack Obama's former spendthrift budget director — is worried. "Those who bemoaned the unsustainability of deficit spending and debt levels," during the Obama administration he wrote last week, "seemed to cry wolf." But now, he warns, the wolf is "lurking much closer to our door."

Look, if God forbid you should run into some health issues and run up a huge hospital bill, then you have a problem. But, God willing, that's a one-time thing. It might take you years of scrimping and saving to pay down that medical debt, but it can be done.

But let's say instead that you're upside down on a McMansion you can't properly afford in a market where you can't sell, you've been paying for the groceries with the Mastercard, paying for the Mastercard with the Visa, and putting your ex-wife's brand-new Lexus on the Amex every year as part of the divorce settlement.

You aren't just in debt; you're flying down the highway at Ludicrous Speed without an off-ramp.

That's basically where Washington is right now, only much, much worse. The idiot with the McMansion and the ex he can't afford won't take the whole neighborhood down with him when his house of cards finally collapses. That idiot tanks his credit rating. We could tank the planet.

President Donald Trump's hope seemed to be that a combination of DOGE-inspired cuts, increased tariff revenue, and bringing higher-wage jobs back to America would give the country breathing room — settle the bond markets down and take those trillion-dollar annual interest payments down a peg or two. 

Here's where things went wrong.

Elon Musk's promise to find a trillion dollars in annual savings never materialized, and whatever savings he and his whiz kids did find, Congress is too cowardly to enact. The so-called Republican Congress doesn't even have the cojones to undo the massive fiscal damage done by Joe Biden's massive spending spree — even though that money largely goes to interests and groups diametrically opposed to conservatism.

DOGE is DOA and I have nothing but f-bombs for the Republican Congress, so let's segue into the next item: entitlements.

Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid are the biggest drivers of spending and debt. In the end, nobody is going to get what they paid in.

Nobody.

Sorry, Charlie — everybody has to take a haircut. But that, as Alexis de Tocqueville noted almost 200 years ago, is where American democracy would someday fall short: "The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money." It took longer than he predicted — mostly because, as Adam Smith said, “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.”

Still, don't you just hate it when the Frenchman is right about us?

"I used to think that if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the President or the Pope or as a 400 baseball hitter," former Clinton hand James Carville quipped in 1993, when jittery bond traders put the kibosh on Clinton's most ambitious (ie, reckless) spending plans. "But now I would like to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody."

The "monkey in the wrench," as John McClane would say, is that there's no intimidating a Congress hell-bent on buying the next election with the voters' money. 

So if there are any readers left here at the end of this doom and gloom column, I’m just happy not to be walking again down that lonely street of dreams.

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