It was Mark Twain who quipped that the ‘great works’ are books that everyone wants to have read, but nobody wants to read. We could easily say the same thing about the U.S. national debt: It is something everyone wants to have cut, but nobody wants to cut.
As the House Republicans’ big beautiful bill moseys over to the Senate for potential passage, there is growing concern among many on the right that the spending cuts are insufficient, and that the bill puts the country on the road to much greater debt.
Senators Ron Johnson, R-Wis., Rick Scott, R-Fla., and Rand Paul, R-Ky., have all promised opposition to what they see as the ‘big bloated bill,’ and DOGE architect Elon Musk has expressed disappointment that the alarm he is raising about the debt, and his cost-cutting recommendations are being ignored.
As usual, this attempt to stand athwart massive spending while yelling, ‘Stop!’ is an uphill battle. Here are five reasons why deficit reduction has been the hardest of political nuts to crack, and how these reasons might be addressed.
1. The Deficit Is Too Abstract
To put it bluntly, very few American voters have a real working understanding of how the national debt actually works. Sometimes it feels like very few members of Congress do either, but it’s a big part of why debt cutting is not a political winner.
Most people vote around issues they feel in their gut, like crime, high prices or immigration, not cold-calculated things like debt and monetary policy. While the Tea Party of 15 years ago may have been an exception, it was a movement of the managerial class, who understood debt, not a broad cross-section of voters.
2. Voters Like Pork
People like free stuff, even when it’s not really free. Even those who support cutting the deficit can get a bit testy when you threaten their slice of the pie, or the money flowing into their communities.
The New York Congressional delegation, led by Rep. Mike Lawler, R-NY, just secured bigger federal deductions for state and local taxes for their constituents. Sure, it comes at the expense of better-run states, but as they say in Brooklyn, it is what it is.
3. Like Climate Change, There Is Deficit Fatigue
There are two issues in American politics that voters have been warned for 40 years must be addressed immediately or else all hell will break loose by next Tuesday. They are climate change and the deficit, and Tuesday never really seems to come.
This is not to say that our staggering national debt hasn’t done great harm to our country; It absolutely has, far more than climate change. But that harm is not felt in an obvious and catastrophic way, so it does not light a fire under voters.
4. Superpower Status
There is a sense among many Americans, and not entirely without cause, that our country’s status as the world’s foremost superpower protects us from being hurt by our foreign creditors. We have nukes, after all, so what are they going to do? Robocall the White House during dinner?
This is, of course, a facile understanding, but it underscores that even though people are concerned about the debt, or say they are, they do not feel it as an existential threat.
5. Neither Party Will Commit To Deficit Cuts
The final reason why Americans have a hard time getting excited about efforts to cut the debt is that both parties always swear they will do it while they are out of power, and never do it when they are in power. They can make the reservation to cut the deficit, but they never show up.
This has led many Americans to just assume it’s never going to happen.
Make no mistake, these are significant headwinds that have stalled out almost every effort to cut the debt for decades. But it doesn’t mean they cannot be overcome.
This week, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis weighed in with serious criticism of some of his GOP compatriots.
‘We have a Republican Congress, and to this day, we’re in the end of May, past Memorial Day, and not one cent in DOGE cuts have been implemented by the Congress,’ he said.
DeSantis is an interesting voice in this debate. He went from winning a governor’s race in then-centrist Florida by the skin of his teeth to winning reelection by 20 points in a mere four years, and he did it not by saying things, but by doing things.
DeSantis took risky positions on things like COVID policy and the economy because he trusted that the results, even in the short-term, would be beneficial. He gambled that he would be rewarded for them, which he surely was.
The fiscal hawks need to talk less about doom and gloom and talk more about how lowering the debt can open doors to things like better credit, homeownership, financial security, and better yet, get a few of these cost-cutting measures past the goalie.
The American people will not be threatened into supporting cost-cutting measures to slash the debt, but they can be convinced. And nothing could be more convincing that this Congress enacting some serious and responsible cost-cutting actions right now.