If you value incompetence and chaos, vote Republican.

Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/27/us/politics/national-debt-trump-reaction.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

Not every year. But the Gingrich-Clinton cooperation - bipartisan! - made it possible.

Neither party is guilt-free since...but three major round of tax cuts (that did not result growth that could pay for them) and two catastrophic wars go a long way to explaining the position we find ourselves in.

To be clear - today we do not need to pay down the debt. We just need balanced budgets. The fixes are well known - raise the retirement age, raise the caps on SS payments, roll back those tax cuts, cut Pentagon spending - but our system is broken.

It seems like political suicide to suggest raising the taxable cap on S.S. without raising the benefit with it, and I'm not sure how the math works to raise them both in a way that benefits the deficit. Haven't spent any time researching it, though.