Words & Phrases

‘Debt crisis’? No, a competency crisis

Whenever a Democrat occupies the White House, Republicans holler about federal debt, lamenting that the economic crisis is around the corner. Their solution (Increase taxes? Cut defense? Don’t be daft!) invariably entails slashing vital domestic programs. But when the debt hit $40T, a new record, Republicans were suspiciously silent. It seems the “crisis” is not a crisis unless the president is a Democrat.

Rep. Becca Balint (D-VT) summed it up perfectly: “We get lectured all of the time by these supposed fiscal hawks. And then every single time they grandstand, they do a little dance on the floor that they’re actually going to stand up to the, you know, the debt and increasing the deficit, and then they fold every time like a cheap fan. I’m so sick of being lectured by them.”

In a similar vein, Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) blasted the Republican pearl-clutching about the debt. “$40 TRILLION. That’s our national debt. Republicans ran up the tab, handed billionaires another tax break, and now wanna lecture working families about ‘fiscal responsibility,’” she POSTED on X. “You can’t max out the card AND pretend you’re the accountant.”

Under Trump, fiscal irresponsibility has reached new heights. “The Treasury Department’s daily financial report shows that the nation’s debt reached $40.05 trillion on August 18, more than double its level in 2017. The federal debt has ballooned because government spending is outstripping revenue, forcing the U.S. to borrow more money to cover the shortfall,” CBS News reported, quoting Michael Peterson, CEO of the nonpartisan Peter G. Peterson Foundation. He reminds us, “It’s clearly been accelerating because, like any debt problem, the longer you ignore it, the worse it gets.”

Whether you think the enormity of the debt is itself a crisis or simply a drag on the economy, the immediate results are indisputable. “As the government continues to borrow, interest payments are consuming a larger share of the nation’s spending, creating a compounding effect that further fuels the debt,” CBS News reports. “The U.S. government now spends more on servicing its debt than on national defense or Medicare.”

Republicans’ galling hypocrisy about spending, debt, and deficits aside, the real crisis (and the cause of MAGA’s political crisis) is an utterly corrupt and incompetent regime pursuing policies that worsen inflation, aggravate the gap between rich and everyone else, keep interest rates high, and thereby produce anemic economic results. As University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers said recently, this president has given us “the most incoherent, chaotic, unhelpful economic policy” of our lifetime, strewn with self-owns (e.g., mass deportation, frenetic tariff shifts) that undermine even the most robust, innovative economy in the world.

In full view last week was the maladministration of our feckless Treasury, egged on by an unhinged president. Paul Krugman explained the latest machination from incompetent sycophant Scott Bessent (whose laughably false statements describing the nonexistent Golden Age — e.g. “unprecedented economic growth, lasting dollar dominance, and fiscal strength and stability” — are further evidence that this Cabinet is a refuge for unqualified White suck-ups):

High long-term interest rates are an embarrassment for the Trump administration, and Bessent is trying to make the picture look prettier, even though this means undermining the people who are supposed to be making monetary policy.

The maneuver is failing: 30-year yields fell briefly on Wednesday, when the policy was announced, but bounced back on Thursday and were higher as I write this than they were a week ago — clear proof that you can’t gaslight the bond market.

So Bessent, a former bond trader himself, has squandered all of his credibility with his sycophancy, his apparent demands that top officials engage in unethical and probably illegal conduct, and his abuse of the Treasury’s financial power for clearly political goals.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent

The Wall Street Journal’s headline dryly observed: “The Wild Week When Scott Bessent Was Schooled by the Bond Market.” The report continued: “Investors remain anxious about stubbornly high inflation, mounting federal debt, a deluge of corporate borrowing to fund artificial-intelligence investments, and a new Federal Reserve chairman whose approach to setting interest rates remains enigmatic to many. For some, the Treasury Department’s response only added to the sense of a typically staid market gone disturbingly off-kilter.”

When confronted with Bessent’s face plant, Trump lashed out, fulminating on the failed bond market gambit: “The ultimate intervention is our military. And if we have to use that, we will.” At best, one can say Trump is shockingly ignorant; at worst, he is so crazed as to imagine the military can storm the bond markets. In any sane political universe, the 25^th Amendment should be seriously considered.

It’s no wonder why the American people have utterly lost confidence in the Trump regime. “A new poll [before the latest meltdown] shows Democrats with a 6-point advantage over Republicans on the economy two months away from the midterm elections,” The Hill reported, citing the results of the Financial Times’ Focaldata poll. With 63 percent saying the economy is moving in the wrong direction, Trump and Bessent’s happy talk is more likely to annoy voters than put their minds at ease.

Across the board, voters are giving Trump and his crew rotten marks for an economy they know does not work for their own families. “Mr Trump’s net approval rating for his handling of inflation and prices reached -44 in August, the lowest it has been this term,” the Economist’s YouGov poll tracker found.

And to put an explanation on the worst spasm of government mismanagement of economic affairs in our lifetime, with thuggish threats, Trump drove Canada, our longtime ally, from the negotiating table and slapped a new 50% tariff on our second closest trading partner, leaving Prime Minister Mark Carney righteously indignant and vowing to decouple his economy from the U.S. The result will be another blow to U.S. consumers, “who have been paying for Mr. Trump’s tariff policies through higher prices that have also been driven by the war in Iran and spiraling oil costs,” as the New York Times reported.

So let’s dispense with the Republicans’ hypocrisy about debt, blame-shifting, and disingenuous demands to scrounge for savings at the expense of working and middle-class families. The only real “crisis” is a crisis in economic competence, brought on by MAGA’s devotion to an unhinged, thoroughly corrupt president, and Republicans’ insistence on fattening the wallets of billionaires and trillionaires. In doing so, they are savaging regulations that protect the health and well-being of Americans, indulging in maddeningly self-destructive trade and immigration policies, and blaming hardworking Americans for the results of a rigged economy. The solution to the crisis begins in November, with a Democratic Congress willing to rein in Trumpian chaos, reverse ludicrous policies (including chaotic tariff moves), and return a measure of stability to the Trump-generated economic catastrophe.