There is much to like about the recently passed Big Beautiful Bill (BBB). To list just a few of its great merits, it will preserve Trump’s tax cuts from his first term, increase funding for deportations and border security, issue child tax credits, empower school choice programs, and boost military defense. It will also cut the tax dollars going to Planned Parenthood and work to reduce the waste, fraud, and abuse in welfare services like Medicare and SNAP.

The stakes for passing this bill were high, and Trump was only able to secure the votes he needed because failure was simply not an option. Had the bill not passed, Republicans would have had to explain why they raised taxes on their constituents and did so little to fix the problems left by the last administration.

But now that the BBB has passed, many otherwise useless and unknown legislators will have something to show for their time in office. As writer Daniel McCarthy explains, “The GOP passed two make-or-break tests here: one of party discipline, the other of political principles. And the party saved its life by getting this bill enacted.”

Of course, besides the perfunctory whining of leftists that this bill will “kill people” and prevent more mothers from murdering their unborn children, the main criticism of the BBB is that, according to the Congressional Budget Office, it “would increase deficits over the 2025‑2034 period by $3.4 trillion.”

For deficit hawks, the U.S. Congress has once again decided to kick this proverbial can down the road, leaving it to younger Americans to bear the burden of a continually ballooning deficit. As such, the libertarians Sen. Rand Paul and Rep. Thomas Massie remained true to form and voted against the bill.

All this seems to follow a familiar script on how to deal with the national deficit: acknowledge that it is bad and portends doom for younger generations, tolerate a few token “principled conservatives” to oppose all government spending, and then do precisely nothing about it and vote for more spending anyway.

After all, conventional wisdom has determined that saving money and paying down America’s debt is politically toxic. Writer Joseph Addington blames American voters for this problem: “Republicans and Democrats alike are acting in accordance with the wishes of their constituents: They want lower taxes, more spending on the things they find important like defense and border security, and no cuts to their government-provided welfare benefits.” Americans don’t want spending cuts, but they also don’t want to pay more taxes, so they vote for the politicians who will cut taxes and increase spending, however unsustainable it may be.

And yet, this argument begs the question by assuming that Americans somehow benefit from government spending or even feel like they do. Would millions of people take to the streets if some small or even large cut was made to their entitlements? There are a few reasons to think that they wouldn’t.

First, how would they even know about any spending cut if an obstructionist and deceitful news media didn’t tell them? And at this point, who really trusts these outlets after they have discredited themselves time and again? Perhaps a few able-bodied deadbeats openly fretted at the requirement that they actually try to find work before applying for government handouts, but most Americans who work for a living either shrugged at this revelation or agreed with it.

Second, most Americans today hardly benefit from these entitlements and usually pay in far more than they stand to receive. Ultimately, the money for these programs is raised from the productive classes to go to the unproductive classes, often including noncitizens. Consequently, most responsible Americans learn from an early age to support themselves so they will never have to depend on an unreliable government. If they were informed that their Social Security checks would be smaller and only come after so many more years of work, they would probably have assumed this would happen anyway — after all, they’re not French.

Third, most entitlement programs take up such a large portion of government spending because they are bloated and broken. This was the main lesson of DOGE’s findings. Sure, most conservatives were appalled by USAID’s shameless promotion of leftist causes and organizations, but the real scandal was just how abysmally inefficient all government programs are. And this is also the case when they hire private contractors to work on behalf of the public.

This is all logically inevitable. When a group charged with spending other people’s money lacks a profit motive and faces little accountability from the people it is supposedly serving, it has every incentive to raise as much money as it can to do as little work as possible.

In light of this, it is wrong to assume that a majority of Americans are going to oppose leaders making meaningful cuts to public spending. The only real outcry will come from the politicians and cronies who have grown rich from a corrupt system. All the available evidence suggests that they are the ones framing spending cuts as necessarily painful and politically impossible, not actual American voters.

Effectively proving this point, President Javier Milei of Argentina has taken his famous chainsaw to vast amounts of public spending and has reversed the fortunes of a country with obscene rates of inflation, rampant poverty, and high taxes. And even though certain interests (i.e., corporate cronies and parasitical public unions) periodically protest his reforms, Milei still enjoys a high approval rating.

For all these reasons, after securing the border and enacting mass deportations, Trump and the GOP should indeed turn their attention to balancing the budget and paying down the debt. As with Argentina, the only real pushback they would face would be from the private contractors, their lobbyists, and socialist demagogues, many of whom are already upset with Trump for reducing illegal immigration.

That said, it’s best to take on one battle at a time. If Trump can win the current battle against the open border left — and with the funding from the BBB, he should — he will have the necessary trust and political capital to fight the growing debt. Contrary to what is commonly believed, most Americans recognize that this needs to happen. Someday soon, we can finally stop kicking this can and throw it in the trash where it belongs.