When the national debt bomb goes off, voters will blame Washington, or the “robber barons” of Wall Street, or maybe China, the media, and George Soros — anyone but themselves. The reality is that there’s virtually no popular will to do anything about the problem.  

The left, of course, has never had any inclination to reduce spending. They’ve long argued that we can squeeze the wealthy while endlessly expanding the welfare state. Conservatives have given us passionate rhetoric over the years, but done very little (other than, perhaps, blunting the left’s agenda). Populists, a political philosophy that’s predicated on telling working-class voters whatever economic myth they want to hear, barely even bother pretending the debt matters. 

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“This bill does not add to the deficit,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act recently passed by the House. The reconciliation bill, an attempt to implement President Donald Trump’s fiscal agenda, is estimated to carry a $2.2 trillion deficit in 2025 and add an additional $3 trillion over 10 years.  

The White House contention is that cuts in waste and fraud will make a dent in the debt. Voters certainly like to hear this sort of thing. Polls tell us that upwards of 75% of people support cutting “government waste.” 

It’s meaningless, though. For most voters, “waste” is just a way of saying “things the government does that I don’t particularly like.” I happen to believe most federal agencies are a waste of money. But those agencies were created and funded by acts of Congress, passed by elected officials voted on by us. That’s not corruption. Just bad decisions.

Even if we were to cut every cent of real waste and fraud in the federal budget, it would effectively do nothing to stifle our exploding national debt. 

Sure, the stated goals of the Department of Government Efficiency are worthwhile. The agency brought attention to some of the most inane spending programs propping up leftist NGOs and other taxpayer-funded rackets via USAID. It temporarily stunted the growth of various subdepartments and set up some efficiencies that one wishes others would mimic. 

Who knows? DOGE might even have saved us some money over the long run had Congress bothered to codify its reforms.

But Musk, perhaps because he was a political neophyte, overpromised. Two trillion dollars in cuts soon turned into one trillion. Now we stand at a relatively modest $160 billion, which will likely be washed out by the many suits filed to counter DOGE cuts. We’re never getting anywhere on the margins. Everyone in Washington knows this, though they may tell voters differently. 

The other purported way Republicans are going to cut into the debt is by spurring the economy with tax cuts. 

Relieving the tax burden is good for the economy. But not good enough. Not anymore. “I have come to the perhaps obvious conclusion that accelerating GDP growth is essential,” Musk recently wrote. “DOGE has and will do great work to postpone the day of bankruptcy of America, but the profligacy of government means that only radical improvements in productivity can save our country.” 

Sounds like a good idea, except for the fact that the United States’ GDP growth has easily outpaced the world over the past decade, and still, the debt continued to grow at historic rates. 

Most people rarely, if ever, feel the size and scope of the government. Neither the middle class, much less the working class, has seen a real federal tax hike in their lifetimes. There have been a succession of tax cuts since the 1980s, even as the government was dramatically expanding. Without any spending limits, that formula is untenable. 

Indeed, every incentive of modern politics works against the implementation of fiscal sanity. Imagine, if you can, a party that championed policies that ensured every taxpayer felt the cost of the size of government they voted for? That party would be battered into irrelevance very quickly. 

Just last week, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) gave in to Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) and the pro-SALT faction, which demands that the public subsidize and incentivize high taxes of Blue States, while ignoring the concerns of fiscal conservatives (I’d call this a “faction,” as well, if there were more than a handful of House members involved).

The last time there was a spending cut in the federal budget was 2013, when the Budget Control Act was activated after Democrats and Republicans couldn’t come to an agreement. Many of you might recall the overwrought reaction of the media and the Left regarding “nihilistic Republicans” who were accused of deliberately sinking the economy. 

The GDP, incidentally, grew by 2.5% in 2014 and 2.9% in 2015. The unemployment rate fell from 7.3% in 2013 to 6.7% in 2014 and then 5.2% in 2015. No one outside of Washington noticed any cut. 

The one area where the GOP might allegedly trim growth in spending is Medicaid, which has expanded over 50% since 2019, approaching a trillion dollars a year and outpacing the other engines of debt creation like Social Security and Medicare. 

Medicaid was established to help children and seniors in poverty, pregnant women, and the disabled. Like all Great Society programs, mission creep has set in and transformed the program into an unrecognizably massive entitlement that now extends to completely healthy, able-bodied adults. The budget would attach work requirements and eligibility restrictions to help curb the growth. 

Still, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and other economic leftists within the GOP, a growing concern on the Right, are trying to undermine those modest welfare reforms. Trump, who has been averse to any entitlement reform, reportedly told the House not to “f*** around with Medicaid.”

If we can’t even get Republicans to curb the growth of the welfare state, a behemoth that’s undercutting families and self-sufficiency, where exactly are we going to get them to cut?

We often hear that voters have difficulty getting their heads around the abstractness of the national debt. Sure, for most of us, there’s little difference between a billion and a trillion, much less 36 trillion. But justification doesn’t really hold water. Every rational and intelligent person understands that the debt-to-GDP ratio is unsustainable. Last year, we spent more servicing the federal debt than we did on national defense. 

ISRAEL IS WINNING THE LONG GAME

No one is saying that a country can’t hold any debt, but ours, pumped up by COVID-era spending, is at its highest ratio since World War II. Right now, our national debt is more than the GDPs of China, Germany, India, Japan, and the U.K. combined. We’re much wealthier than any of them. But anyone can be overleveraged.  

We can still do something. Elected officials won’t, until voters start to really care. And by then, it might be too late.