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The Republican party is generally claimed to be the party of fiscal responsibility. Note the term "claimed" here; I do not think the record of Republican governance proves this claim at all well, but nonetheless the default expectation seems persistent. When I was younger, this was certainly a selling-point of the party to me, and I voted for Bush II in the hope that he'd get government spending under control. Then 9/11 happened, and he wasted trillions wandering our military through the middle east.
Now the debt is very bad, and people are once more raising the banner of Fiscal Responsibility. Is it in Republicans' interest to enforce "fiscal responsibility", and if so, how? If we were to seriously cut spending and raise taxes, as people claim the fiscal situation demands, this would almost certainly cost us the next election. In the best possible case that I can see, we would be expending our political power to create stable economic conditions for our opponents to then rule. The more likely case would be us expending our political power to ameliorate spending that our opponents increase to gain power for themselves, resulting in a much shakier economy and our complete political irrelevance.
Why not offer the Fiscal Responsibility mantel to the Democrats? The economy is very complicated after all, and they are at this point clearly the party of Expert Opinion: who better to determine and implement the hard-nosed measures necessary to right our economic vessel? When I was younger, the obvious rejoinder would have been that they would do a bad job of it and disaster would result, but it seems to me that we have not done all that much better, and disaster seems likely in any case. If disaster cannot be meaningfully avoided, then why expend limited resources demanded by a serious political conflict on an unfixable resource-sink of a problem? What's the actual plan, here?
The Republicans haven't been the party of "fiscal responsibility" any more than the Democrats have been the party of the working class in living memory.
Are you just making a somewhat sardonic argument for accelerationism ("we should just loot the treasury since that's what everyone does when they're in power?") or do you actually have a proposition for how we could right the ship in some fashion? I feel like you're really just making another pitch for accepting that America is over, and so, okay, then what?
The actual solution to the debt is what we've discussed many times: entitlements and defense spending, both of which are regarded as more or less untouchable. Every other "budget-cutting measure" (including and especially DOGE) is just theatrics. Since most people agree that neither party will have the stones to cut Social Security or Medicare or really meaningfully slash the military, the actual question seems to be, can we somehow survive this? (Here we hear arguments for AGI saving us, or asteroid mining opening up a new frontier, or Modern Monetary Theory being real, all just variations on "Wish for a miracle.") Or are we debating how much ruin is actually left in the nation and whether we or our children will outlive it?
There is always the option that we face reality and do the hard things, and I think that is still possible - sometimes people do the hard things when they actually have no other choice. But you do make a compelling case that rather than hoping for actual economic reform even if it does mean I personally will see my retirement amount to less than it should have been, I should be selfish and just try to grab what I can and hope I'm dead before the shit really hits the fan. Sucks for the kids, though.
The reality is that to balance the budget you have to answer- who do you want to kill? Grandma or our soldiers? And nobody willing to answer that question will ever get elected.
The political realities mean the debt will be paid for by 1) inflation and 2) lying about the debt(your social security checks will not go as far as promised, sorry). The government will bail out load bearing sectors of the economy, maybe at third remove, but the average person will see a decline in purchasing power. Maybe to Western European levels, maybe not. It’ll be a prolonged economic crisis and that will cause political instability but there’s a lot of ruin in a country.
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