By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday, May 04, 2026
We finally really did it! You maniacs!
You blew it up!
From the numbers-monkeys over in the statistical
department comes the news that U.S. government debt has crossed a red line:
Debt held by the public now exceeds 100 percent of GDP, those figures being
$31.27 trillion and $31.22 trillion, respectively.
What that means is that if the federal government were
somehow able to pass a tax that would confiscate 100 percent of the output of
the U.S. economy for a year—if consumption somehow magically fell to $0.00 and
Americans were able to do nothing else with their economic efforts except put
their fruits toward the national debt—it would not be enough.
Oh, don’t worry—it gets worse.
On top of the $31.3 trillion in federal debt per se,
there’s another $88 trillion or so (some estimates are higher) in unfunded
liabilities for major entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare.
There’s another $1.5 trillion or so in unfunded state and local government
pension liabilities, which are not a federal liability as a formal matter, but
it is all the same from the taxpayers’ collective point of view, and the
pressure for a federal bailout of the states may very well overwhelm our
weak-kneed Congress. Call it $120 trillion in the hole just to keep the number
simple. That is just a little bit more than the total economic output
of the entire human race in 2025. That is a lot of money: In fact,
even if you define “money” relatively broadly (here, I’m using M2, meaning all
the cash, checking and savings deposits, and smaller instruments such as
certificates of deposit) it is—fun fact!—more than
all the money in the world.
Oh, don’t worry—it gets worse!
The Congressional Budget Office adds this cheery context:
Deficits
In CBO’s projections, the federal
budget deficit in fiscal year 2026 is $1.9 trillion and grows to $3.1 trillion
by 2036. Relative to the size of the economy, the deficit is 5.8 percent of
gross domestic product (GDP) in 2026 and grows to 6.7 percent in 2036, which is
greater than the 3.8 percent deficits averaged over the past 50 years. Rising
net interest costs drive much of that increase. The primary deficit, which
excludes those net interest costs, totals 2.6 percent of GDP this year and
stays below that level through 2036, when it totals 2.1 percent.
Debt
From 2026 to 2036, large and
growing deficits cause debt to increase. Federal debt held by the public rises
from 101 percent of GDP this year to 120 percent in 2036, surpassing its
previous high of 106 percent of GDP in 1946.
Outlays and Revenues
In CBO’s projections, federal
outlays in 2026 total $7.4 trillion, or 23.3 percent of GDP. Relative to the
size of the economy, outlays remain near their 2026 level through 2028 and then
rise, reaching 24.4 percent of GDP in 2036; that trend is a result of greater
spending on Social Security and Medicare and growth in net interest costs that
are partly offset by declining outlays for discretionary programs. Revenues
total $5.6 trillion, or 17.5 percent of GDP, in 2026. Over the 2026–2036
period, increasing individual income tax receipts and remittances from the
Federal Reserve are partly offset by declining customs duties measured in
relation to the size of the economy. In 2036, revenues total 17.8 percent of
GDP, slightly above their 50-year average of 17.3 percent.
The bosses here at The Dispatch have asked me to
keep the profanity to a minimum, so I am not going to write in plain English
what it is that we are: Let’s just say that it is a problem we have not ducked.
If longtime readers will forgive my repetition here, I
think it is necessary that we liberate ourselves from the crippling
superstitions and anesthetizing lies that almost always accompany the
discussion of this issue. A few facts to tattoo on your brain:
1.
This debt is not driven by incontinent spending
on a selection of boutique federal programs that you and your friends don’t
like. The main drivers of our debt are Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and
other medical entitlements, national security, and interest on debt already
incurred, the latter being a growing and worrisome burden. At present, Social
Security by itself accounts for 22 percent of all federal spending; interest payments are 14 percent;
non-Medicare health spending is 14 percent; Medicare is another 14 percent;
national defense is 13 percent, low by historical U.S. standards; “income
security,” meaning welfare writ large, is 10 percent; veterans’ programs are 6
percent; every other damned thing put together adds up to only 6 percent of
federal spending. The 2025 deficit amounted to 26 percent of federal spending,
meaning we borrowed a little more than $1 out of every $4 we spent. That means
that we could cut Social Security spending in half, cut Medicare
spending in half, and cut national-defense spending in half and
still not balance the budget.
2.
Contrary to what my Republican friends often
insist, there is no obvious way out of this without entitlement reform and
higher taxes or major defense cuts—very likely, all of the above will be
required. We could cut non-defense non-entitlement spending to $0.00 and not be
able to balance the budget. There is no balanced budget without major
entitlement reform, but entitlement reform on its own will not be sufficient:
There will have to be large cuts to defense spending and other programs or a
large tax increase. Both Democrats and Republicans in Congress, and the ones
who have sought their parties’ respective presidential nominations in recent
years, generally oppose such cuts. Republicans generally oppose tax increases,
and Donald Trump seems to have successfully dragged the GOP into a position of
blanket opposition to entitlement reform, at least where that would concern Social
Security and Medicare.
3.
Contrary to what my progressive friends so often
insist, our debt crisis is not the result of tax cuts, and a return to
Eisenhower-era tax rates would not fix the problem—in fact, such a policy would
not improve the fiscal situation at all. That is because the federal
government collects more in taxes today than it did in the supposed economic
golden age of the postwar years: Federal taxes from 1956 to 1960 ran 17
percent, 17.3 percent, 16.8 percent, 15.7 percent, and 17.3 percent of GDP. In
2025, federal taxes amounted to 17.3 percent of GDP, a little bit higher
than in the Eisenhower years and higher than the 1950-1970 average. The
variation is on the spending side: 1950-1970, federal spending ran 17.6 percent
of GDP; in 2025, it was 23 percent of GDP—nearly a third more in GDP
terms. Tax collections have stayed the same, edging up only a little, but
spending is radically higher.
4.
Warmaking isn’t cheap, but all this isn’t really
a warmaking burden. In GDP terms, defense spending has been trending downward
over the years, while entitlement spending is up sharply. Defense spending was
9 percent of GDP as late as 1962, more than three times the 2025 level
of 2.9 percent of GDP. In the same years, Social Security spending more than
doubled as a share of GDP, and as late as 1979, Medicare spending was only 1
percent of GDP and had more than trebled to 3.3 percent of GDP by 2025.
Means-tested (“welfare”) spending went from 0.7 percent of GDP in 1962 to 1.7
percent of GDP in 2025. The notional surpluses at the turn of the century
(1999, 2000, 2001) all involved spending that was under 18 percent of GDP. This
isn’t to say that the Republican-backed tax cuts of that era were good policy
(I do not think they were) or that they did not make things marginally worse
(it certainly seems they did), but the thing that has changed dramatically is spending.
The numbers are pretty clear on that. There is no year on record, from the
beginning of the federal data set in 1930 to the present, in which federal tax
collections would have been sufficient to sustain current spending levels: Even
in 1944—while the federal government was funding World War II—taxes just barely
topped 20 percent of GDP.
If you think I’m being funny with the numbers, please do
go see for yourself—this is all easily accessible public information.
Oh, don’t worry—it gets worse!
While the White House is busy indicting former federal
bureaucrats for ... posting pictures of seashells on social media ... we are
potentially only one failed Treasury auction away from fiscal apocalypse. I put
the word “potentially” in there only because nobody knows what a national
fiscal crisis looks like when the country in question is responsible for a
quarter of the entire world’s economic output. My guess is that it will not
look good, and while it is possible that the sheer scale of the U.S. economy
will buy us some leeway, it is equally likely that we already have been
extended much of the leeway that we can reasonably expect. Laugh at supposed
socialist hellholes like Sweden and Denmark all you like, but those
big-spending, high-tax welfare states have debt-to-GDP ratios of 35 percent and 28 percent, respectively. (N.B.: You’ll note
some discrepancy here, with U.S. debt listed in the linked table at 123 percent
of GDP; that’s because this figure includes so-called interagency debt,
obligations the U.S. government notionally owes to itself. The EU version of that amounts to about 1.1 percent of EU GDP;
the comparison remains useful, in my view, even if it is not exactly
apples-to-apples, and different fiscal practices and government structures make
more technically precise comparisons difficult.) There are millions of reasons
the Scandinavian model probably would not work very well here (roughly 343
million reasons—Americans!), but as a purely fiscal matter there is much to be
said for Nordic practice.
We could, still, even at this late hour, do something
responsible and proactive to get this under control.
Or we could keep spinning the cylinder on the .44 magnum
and see where this game of fiscal roulette takes us.
Words About Words
Some wordiness—and a little economics, too.
An unusually irritating Washington Post column bears
the headline:
Targeting this $2.8 trillion tax
shelter could solve a big U.S. problem
Only good can come from taxing
these “nonprofits.”
I’m always interested in a good tax-shelter story. This
isn’t a tax-shelter story. The “tax shelter” in question is ... the fact that
large nonprofits exist. Scott Hodge, president emeritus of the Tax
Foundation, has a bee in his bonnet about this, offering as an example the PGA
Tour, which, like many sports leagues, is organized as a nonprofit. He writes:
The PGA Tour qualifies as a nonprofit “business league,” which
means it pays no income taxes on the hundreds of millions it makes from
tournament sponsorships and TV deals.
That is not quite right. (Surprise.) In reality, the PGA
has both a nonprofit and a for-profit wing, and the revenue from media rights
goes to the for-profit entity, PGA Tour Enterprises, which recently has booked
hundreds of millions of dollars in profit and is liable for corporate taxes on
its taxable income. PGA Tour events are, indeed, mainly organized as charitable
endeavors, and the organization reports that it has distributed more than $4
billion in charitable contributions.
It gets a little complicated, but the PGA’s
nonprofit/for-profit dual structure doesn’t appear to be so much engineered to
shortchange the taxman as to shortchange star golfers whose PGA “equity grants” remain
illiquid while the nonprofit arm, which is the majority owner of the
for-profit organization, is loaded up with hundreds of millions of dollars in
losses. I am here reminded of how some of the stars of the Star Wars franchise
never saw big paydays on their back-end points because, thanks to the miracle
of “Hollywood accounting,” some of those films never technically made money. I’m sure
there is a tax-planning aspect to it as well, but it is not simply the case
that PGA is putting gazillions of dollars into the pockets of executives,
competitors, or shareholders without tax liability on its profits.
Sports leagues can be a little goofy: The NFL is not a
nonprofit today, but it was a nonprofit for a long time. That doesn’t mean that
the vast profits generated by professional football went untaxed during its
nonprofit years: The NFL did not pay taxes, but Jerry Jones did, and other team
owners did, shareholders did, and players and coaches did, etc. Sports leagues
are in that sense like other business associations: The National Association of
Realtors is a tax-exempt nonprofit whose job is to promote the economic
interests of its members, but its members’ businesses are not tax-exempt.
Neither are the earnings of the NAR staff and executives.
Hodge notes this about nonprofit hospitals:
Consider nonprofit hospitals and
health care plans: In 2023, they generated $1.3 trillion in revenue and nearly $45 billion in tax-free
profits. The largest, Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and its affiliated
hospitals, recently announced over $127 billion in revenue in 2025 — more than many of
America’s largest for-profit companies — yet paid no corporate income tax on
more than $9.3 billion in net income.
But the reason that $9.3 billion in net income was not
taxed is because it was not realized or distributed as taxable income.
Nonprofit surpluses do not get paid out like corporate dividends—they get
reinvested into the enterprise, which is where the money comes from if a
nonprofit hospital chain wants to add, say, upgraded fetal MRI services or
build a new cancer treatment facility. It is true that some nonprofit
executives and employees get paid pretty well—Do you want a bargain-basement
pediatric specialist for your sick kid?—and they pay income tax on those
salaries and bonuses and whatnot the same way they would if they worked for
for-profit companies. And when a nonprofit hospital spends $1 million on
equipment from a for-profit business, that normally produces some profit for
the for-profit business, which is taxed as business income under the usual
procedures.
Some of this stuff is just the weird bias against
enterprises that are big. It’s not like there are no corrupt or abusive small
businesses, small towns, small government agencies, or small nonprofits. Hodge complains that the AARP’s
sponsorship deal with the Washington Nationals is “hardly the action of your
neighborhood nonprofit” and that the nonprofit sector includes many enterprises
that are, in revenue terms, larger than many for-profit businesses: “The
commercial revenue generated by these nonprofits totaled $2.8 trillion in 2023, nearly three times the
amount nonprofits receive from donations and government grants.”
So, we’re supposed to be mad at nonprofit hospitals
because they have found ways to generate revenue rather than rely on
donations and government grants? That is a very odd complaint, in my view, as
is the implicit preference for “neighborhood” nonprofits. Small organizations
sometimes do great work—and so do large ones. Mom-and-pop do-gooder committees
really cannot do the kind of work done by, say, the Red Cross or Catholic
Charities. Some social purposes are better served by larger organizations than
by smaller ones–or by cheap sloganeering about “neighborhood” this or that. The
NAACP takes in tens of millions of dollars in revenue most years, and it uses
that money to further its mission. Presumably, the NAACP could do more if it
had more revenue at its disposal, and if it found ways to raise that revenue
compatible with its mission, it is difficult for me to see how, exactly, that
would be a bad thing.
Hodge has it exactly wrong, in my view. Rather than
applying corporate taxes to nonprofits, we ought to get rid of corporate taxes
entirely. That does not mean that the money earned by Microsoft or Goldman
Sachs or the law firm of Nasty, Brutish & Short would escape taxation—it
would mean only that the taxes would be paid by people, when they
received actual income in the form of dividends, capital gains, salaries,
bonuses, etc. There is a case (Megan McArdle makes it) for treating all income the same
way, whether it is an ordinary paycheck or a dividend or an inheritance. There
are good arguments on both sides of that (I think it would be good to reinforce
incentives for long-term business performance when structuring executives’
compensation, but treating all income the same way would create a bias toward
simple salaries), but, in any case, taxing corporate income per se and
then re-taxing dividends distributed from that after-tax income is a cumbrous
and kind of dumb way to do things.
Ah, but this is a language feature!
Do you know what a “tax shelter” is? It is a lot like a
“loophole” or a “technicality” that sees an accused criminal go free: It is an
aspect of the law that you don’t like. That’s all. Our laws may be
stupidly written, but they are carefully stupidly written. The laws
generally say what they say because somebody wrote the law that way on purpose.
We didn’t create the nonprofit corporation by accident.
For comparison: We have a “standard deduction” of $15,750
for individual U.S. taxpayers—i.e., we shelter the first $15,750 in
income—but nobody calls that a “tax shelter.” We don’t usually convict
criminals who have been brought up on charges after illegal surveillance or
following a search without a properly executed warrant or after a confession
produced via torture, but it is rare to hear anybody denounce these
considerations as “technicalities.” The fact that farm kids can do chores is
not a “loophole” in our child-labor laws—that’s just the law.
It is particularly maddening when members of Congress
denounce “loopholes” and “technicalities” and the like—if the lawmakers don’t
like the laws, then they can change the damned laws, no?
If you want to raise more revenue for the federal
government—I do! See the top item!—then there are better and worse ways to do
that. When it comes to the federal income tax, we should probably have more
taxpayers and fewer deductions. I don’t think putting the bootheel of the IRS
on the Shriners Children’s hospitals probably gets it done.
And Furthermore ...
If you’ll forgive the hippie-punching, I always have the
same thought when I read about one of these May Day blanket economic boycotts:
If the big idea is to stop work and withhold consumer spending to show the world your
economic might, then you should probably try to get your movement to
include some workers and consumers whose absence will be ... noticed. In my
world, I’d notice if Amazon deliveries stopped, and I’d be miffed if Jiffy Lube
or Discount Tire weren’t open during their regular hours. (Those are two great
American businesses, by the way, the kind of capitalism that just gets stuff
done.)
But these May Day knuckleheads? What would you say you do
here, kids? The Standard Practices of Right-Wing Columnists Handbook advises
that I make a joke about baristas with gender-studies degrees here, but, in
reality, the baristas I encounter on a regular basis are hardworking and
capable, and many of them get to work before 5 a.m. pretty much every day five
or six or seven days a week—and that is no joke. Farmers and ranchers and
meatpackers aren’t taking the day off, and neither are owner-operator truck
drivers, New York City cab drivers, ER nurses, home health aides, the people
who staff mental health crisis hotlines, or, God bless them, what’s left of
America’s local newspaper reporters. Discount Tire will still fix your flat for
free wherever you bought the tire in the hope that you’ll buy your next one
from them. I’ll bet that whoever sells those Palestinian flags to the idiot
children who wave them on college campuses is hard at work, too.
I’m sure that somebody is taking the day off. Just nobody
who does work that I care about.
In Closing
Of course the United States now makes troop-deployment
decisions in response to Donald Trump’s hurt feelings. What a dumb time to
be alive.
Of course worldwide material abundance is shockingly high and rising. What an amazing time to be alive.
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