Albeit uncomfortable, imagine you’ve suffered a terrible accident — one that leaves your life hanging by a thread. You’re rushed to the ER, where doctors follow the ABCs of trauma care: airway, breathing, and circulation.
The airway comes first. If it’s blocked, you can’t breathe — game over. Only once it’s clear can doctors move on to breathing and circulation. That’s a simple description of a complex protocol, but it helps crystalize the problem that only a few members of Congress — and, sadly, too few citizens — seem to understand or care about.
America’s airway is obstructed. Yet Washington acts as if everything else matters more.
That obstruction has a name: debt.
This week, the national debt hit another all-time high — $38 trillion. In just two months, from August to October, the country added $1 trillion, the fastest climb in U.S. history with the exception of the pandemic. We’re not just struggling to breathe — we’re sucking the oxygen out of the room.
And while the government shutdown drags on, most of Congress appears content to ignore it. A few voices, like Thomas Massie and Rand Paul, raise alarms, but they’re shouting into a void.
Side note: President Trump’s made no secret of his dislike for Massie — he wants him out. But why? Massie’s one of the few up there who actually gets it. He dares to say no when everyone else nods yes…
The current standoff centers on extending ACA tax credits. Republicans want to reopen government with a clean continuing resolution and negotiate later; Democrats refuse until the issue’s resolved. But honestly — what’s it matter if America can’t breathe?
Mandatory or discretionary spending, tax credits or programs — it’s all irrelevant if the patient’s dying. Debt is the underlying condition. Fix it, and we can move on. Ignore it, and we die.
Plenty of texts to 304-TALK-304 dismiss the problem:
“TJ, my economics instructor said not to worry — it’s just money we owe ourselves” or the like (paraphrased).”
Here’s the problem with that logic…
Roughly $7.6 trillion — about 20 percent — is intragovernmental debt: money borrowed by one part of the federal government from another, like the Social Security and Medicare trust funds. People paid that money into the system expecting a service that is owed to them. It matters if those funds are not paid back.
The other $30.4 trillion is held by the public — including foreign creditors, who own about 24 percent of the total debt.
Those nations — allies or not — expect to be paid back. So do U.S. companies parking cash in Treasuries or any number of investors large and small. The full faith and credit of the U.S. makes the Dollar and Treasuries “risk free” in the eyes of the market.
Now imagine we can’t keep up with debt service — which has already hit $969 billion this year, more than our defense budget. We’ve exhausted the printing press, so we default. What happens? Consider just a few scenarios.
- Confidence collapses. The dollar loses its reserve-currency status as central banks flee to the euro, yen, or gold. The fall of the British pound offers a grim preview.
- Yields spike. Treasury rates skyrocket, pushing up mortgages, car loans, and corporate borrowing. The economy contracts, deficits swell, and — irony of ironies — the debt worsens.
- Global finance seizes up. Because nearly 90 percent of world trade relies on Dollars and Treasuries as top-tier collateral, a U.S. default would disrupt trade, insurance, and commodity markets, triggering global liquidity crises.
Full, faith and credit completely evaporated, it would make the 2008 housing contagion look like a field trip to the zoo.
If that scares you, it should. That’s the point. And that fear should move you to demand action.
We can’t erase $38 trillion overnight, but we can start getting back to manageable levels. At the start of this century, debt was about 55 percent of GDP; today it’s over 120 percent. Both parties share the blame — neither has proposed a budget that truly reduces the debt. Deficit after deficit — that’s the pattern history has recorded, and there’s no reason to believe 2026 will be any different.
As Rand Paul notes, both sides keep spending trillions we don’t have — they just differ on what to spend it on. When you don’t have it, you don’t spend it. That kind of common sense doesn’t seem to apply in Washington. Instead, leaders would rather argue for tax hikes as a fix or gamble that more tax cuts will magically generate enough revenue to cover their programs — anything but actually cutting spending to immediately balance the budget. Too hard, too high a price to pay politically.
It’s time to clear America’s airway. Nothing else matters until we do. It’s that simple.