Republicans talk about the national debt. It’s up to progressives to fix it.

Whether you agree or not, this is how Democrats see the debt debate: For 25 years, Republicans have passed one deficit-financed tax cut after another — the Bush cuts, the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, and last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which will add roughly $4 trillion to the debt.

Then, when Democrats propose universal pre-K or expanded health coverage, the deficit hawks seem to reappear on cue: “We can’t afford that!” Further, most Democrats suspect that it is really large corporate interests that are pulling the strings — a position increasingly adopted by the populist wing of the Republican Party, as well.

In my current role as executive director of the Concord Coalition and Concord Action, I have to spend a lot of time with my former Democratic colleagues trying to explain why they should care about deficits and the federal budget.

Here is the trouble. When my father taught me to drive, he warned me it would not matter who was at fault if everyone in the car died in a wreck. The debt does not care who ran it up, or why, or whether you supported a single dollar of it. It is a claim against our future, and we are all in the car.

Two ways Americans will pay for running up deficits

Credit: Handout

Credit: Handout

The United States now owes over $40 trillion, more than our economy produces in a year.

We are running deficits estimated at over $2 trillion annually — in relative peacetime, at full employment, without a European-style safety net. Interest payments consume nearly 1 of every 5 tax dollars, more than we spend on national defense, and are headed toward 1-in-4 within a decade.

In response, bond markets are starting to demand higher interest rates — making the problem worse — and inflation is creeping up.

We are going to pay for this. The only question is how.

There are two ways.

Crises are not evenhanded. My colleagues and I have spent a lot of time with economists mapping the endgame, and most scenarios run through some mix of severe inflation and spiking interest rates, as fiscal policy overwhelms the Federal Reserve’s ability to stabilize the economy. Neither outcome is progressive.

Inflation is the most regressive tax there is: Low-income households spend more of their income on food, rent and fuel. They cannot stock up when prices dip. They have no assets to move money in to.

The Minneapolis Fed documented exactly this during the last inflation wave, when the burden fell hardest on low-income households, on Black and Hispanic families, and on renters. If the reckoning comes through interest rates instead, it lands on the young couple trying to buy a first house and the barber trying to finance a second chair.

Credit: AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib

Credit: AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib

Make no mistake, elites won’t end up holding the bag

And if you want to see what fiscal autopilot does to the poor, you don’t need a model of Argentina or Greece. Look at Social Security.

Under the Social Security Trustees’ report, released in June, the retirement trust fund runs dry in late 2032 — just six years from now — and benefits are automatically cut by 22%. Not means-tested. Not phased in. Not debated. The same 22% for the retiree living on $1,300 a month as for the executive collecting the maximum. Congress designed the most regressive cut imaginable and set it to trigger on its own if nobody acts. That is what doing nothing looks like. Inaction is not neutrality. It is a policy, and a cruel one.

Meanwhile the grind continues. Every dollar of interest is a dollar not spent on childcare, housing, research or working-family tax credits. We are eating the seed corn, spending down the nation’s capacity to invest in the young and the poor in order to service the cost of wars of choice, unpaid-for tax cuts and programs like healthcare whose costs we never controlled.

There is nothing conservative about asking who ends up holding the bag. Some of the fiercest anti-debt measures in American history came from populists and progressives — from farmers and small-business taxpayers who watched canal and railroad interests capture their legislatures, run up public debt and walk away.

Today’s progressives should claim this tradition. When the bill finally comes due, it is not the private-island class that pays it. It is working- and middle-class taxpayers who spend decades grinding it down, and the poor, who get a bad economy and a frayed safety net at the same time. In every crisis in living memory, when this country catches a cold, the most vulnerable communities get pneumonia.

So, I would ask my friends on the left to stop treating this as the other side’s issue. If you believe government should be able to do big things for people who need them, you should be the most alarmed person in the room about a budget where interest is the fastest-growing line and the fiscal space for everything else is closing fast. Fiscal responsibility is not an alternative to a progressive agenda. Right now, it is the precondition for one.

Carolyn Bourdeaux is a former Democratic member of Congress from Georgia’s 7th District. She is a contributor to the AJC.

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