Congress Owns This Debt Crisis

This week’s meeting of the Committee to Horse-Whip Mike Johnson will now come to order.

New business?

I can think of 50 good reasons to flog Mike Johnson, the dishonorable little lickspittle who supposedly serves as speaker of the House but whose main function in this earthly life is being a knee-walking sycophant and self-abasing enabler of Donald Trump—and No. 1 on the list of reasons to have him horse-whipped right now is this: $1 trillion in new debt in just two months, a headlong rush into national financial ruination not matched since the orgy of COVID spending.

We talk about presidents and deficits all the time, and that is a mistake—although it is worth keeping in mind that Trump, as president, was perfectly contented with that recklessly incontinent COVID spending he and other Republicans signed off on. You’ll recall that Trump insisted that his own name appear on the relief checks, as though he were doing Americans a personal favor by bribing them with their own money. Trump has never lifted one stumpy little pinkie finger to rein in the deficit.

But the real fiscal malefactor is Congress—and that means, for the moment, Mike Johnson. Our Constitution gives the House of Representatives the sole power of introducing taxing and spending bills, and Johnson leads a Republican majority in that chamber—at least, that is the job he is supposed to be doing when he is not polishing Trump’s wingtips with his tongue.

But Johnson is not interested in exercising the power the Constitution invests in his office—which is to say, he is not interested in doing his job. He wears Very Serious Man glasses but is not a very serious man—he’s basically Brainy Smurf without the brains. “Some men are born mediocre, some achieve mediocrity, and some have mediocrity thrust upon them”—in Johnson’s case, it seems to have been all three.

And he evidently is content to sit on his ass and do nothing as the federal debt piles up at a shocking pace: To reiterate, we have gone another trillion dollars into hock in just two months under Johnson’s mismanagement.

The habitual liars who do Trump’s public-relations work for him insist that Republican leaders have the fiscal situation well in hand, that tariff revenues and spending discipline (ho, ho!) have come together to change our national fiscal vector, previously pointed at catastrophe. “Revenues are soaring and government spending is under control” says Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary.

This is—no one will be surprised to learn—untrue.

Here is a chart of our national debt: You’ll notice that the slope is consistently upward and that it took a little tick toward the vertical over the summer. In fact, tariff revenue is up, but not by all that much in dollar terms: Through August, additional tariff revenue from Trump’s anarchic trade war amounted to about $88 billion for the year. That is a modest development given the very low baseline. For all of FY2025, tariffs reached about $215 billion—approximately squat in the greater scheme of things and very possibly a net economic loss once you account for the business disruptions caused by tariff ad-hocracy. The Yale Budget Lab estimates that at least 61 percent of the new import tax costs—maybe as much as 80 percent—were passed on to American consumers.

You can blame Democrats for a lot of things, but Republicans control the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives right now. They could change things if they wanted to. But dealing with the debt requires one—or both—of two unpopular options: 1) higher taxes; 2) lower spending. Republicans are strangely enthusiastic about higher taxes just now—as long as the tax in question is a national sales tax on imports and, more to the point, as long as Trump likes it. But that isn’t getting the fiscal job done: New debt accumulated at just about $70,000 per second over the past year with Republicans in charge of taxing and spending.

There is no way to polish that turd.

And there is no evading the fact that doing something about the debt is the responsibility of Congress—and, in particular, of Mike Johnson, who currently leads the majority caucus in the House. You can assign the speaker whatever motive you like—cowardice, impotence, stupidity—but there is nowhere else to assign his very significant portion of blame. Congressional Republicans seem to have forgotten that they represent the people of their districts rather than the president.

As it happens, that president is out there knocking down half the White House with a bulldozer—with no legal authorization, of course—treating the executive building as though it were his personal property. Mike Johnson and congressional Republicans are doing the same thing with our national finances—and our children’s future.