Borrowed Bravado
It’s always strange to watch a government declare victory while lighting its own credit card on fire.
This week, House Republicans passed a bill that promises everything. Lower taxes. A smaller government. A stronger border. A freer economy. A future where overtime isn’t taxed and car loan interest is deductible—if the car was made in America, of course.
They called it historic. They called it generational. They called it a win for families and job creators and the American spirit.
What they didn’t call it was what it actually is: $4 trillion deeper into debt.
The bill raises the debt ceiling by another $4 trillion. That’s the fine print buried beneath the chest-pounding about freedom and fiscal responsibility. The same lawmakers who once treated the debt ceiling as a sacred line in the sand now lift it with one hand and wave the flag with the other. Because this time it’s their agenda on the line.
That’s the quiet part. The part no one at the press conference wants to dwell on. The paradox at the heart of modern American conservatism: spend less, borrow more.
It’s not that the debt ceiling shouldn’t be raised. Default would be catastrophic. But there’s something perverse about wrapping a permanent expansion of the Trump tax cuts inside a bill that demands work requirements for Medicaid. There’s something grotesque about calling it “efficiency” when you claw back food assistance from the poor while handing a fresh round of deductions to those with enough income to worry about SALT caps.
And then acting like the numbers magically balance.
They don’t. They never do.
Tax cuts don’t pay for themselves. They didn’t in 2017, and they won’t now. Most honest estimates show this bill would blow a massive hole in the budget—trillions in lost revenue over the next decade, partially offset by cuts to programs that serve people who don’t have lobbyists.
We’ve done this dance before. Call it trickle-down, call it supply-side, call it MAGAnomics 2.0. It’s the same playbook with better branding. The wealthiest keep more. The middle gets crumbs. The deficit balloons. And eventually someone, somewhere, decides that Social Security is the real problem.
What makes this different is the timing. This isn’t 1981 or 2001 or even 2017. We’re not cutting taxes in an era of growth. We’re not slashing safety nets from a place of surplus. We’re doing it in the face of a $36 trillion national debt, rising interest payments, and a credit rating that was just downgraded.
We are no longer borrowing from the future. We are borrowing from a fire.
And still, there’s no pause. No humility. Just more bravado.
The tax cuts are marketed as relief for working families, but the structure reveals the truth. The benefits skew upward. The breaks are temporary for the middle, permanent for the powerful. Even the child tax credit boost comes with fine print—it’s only available to people with Social Security numbers, and only until 2028. After that, it drops again. But the corporate cuts? The estate tax protections? The carried interest loophole? Untouched. Eternal.
It’s a vision of fairness built on exclusions. And a vision of growth built on faith.
There is a moment in every empire’s decline when belief becomes substitute for policy. When economic orthodoxy hardens into ritual. That’s what this feels like. A ritual bill. A performance of confidence. A projection of strength with no fiscal muscle behind it.
And maybe that’s the point. The modern budget process isn’t really about numbers anymore. It’s about narratives.
This one goes like this: we are saving America. From the takers. From the elites. From the bureaucrats. From the deficit… by adding to it.
The paradox collapses into ideology. As long as the right people benefit, debt isn’t a burden—it’s an investment. As long as the right enemies are targeted, cuts aren’t cruel—they’re courageous.
But numbers are stubborn. Interest payments don’t care about ideology. Markets don’t bend to narratives forever.
At some point, we have to answer the question we keep avoiding: how do we fund a nation that still believes it deserves everything, but refuses to pay for anything?
Until then, we legislate like gamblers. Bold. Unshaken. Deeply in the hole.
And cheering louder with every borrowed dollar.