We developed chronic overspending habits when interest rates were historically low. This made servicing the debt cheap and deficit spending reasonable. Why wouldn’t the government borrow at 0.14% (!!!) with GDP growth at say 3-4%.

Now the math doesn’t work with a federal fund rate of 4-5%. And now as our debt rolls over it gets refinanced at the higher rates. Debt servicing is roughly 20% of the government budget and will soon be 25-35% in ~10 years assuming we don’t further accelerate deficit spending (which seems unlikely).

US govt needs to cut dramatically to avoid this and the otherwise likely “solution” otherwise is inflation to make the debt effectively less expensive which also raises interest rates.

We can’t tax our way out of this. Only 60% of US households earn enough to pay federal income tax. The top 1% of earners already pay roughly half of all tax revenue, top 10% is roughly 75%. Furthermore, there is profligate waste in government, inefficiency, no matter where the taxes came from even if we could materialize them.

The government needs to shrink dramatically. This type of change is best done gradually but immediately to avoid later shocks (eg: Medicare suddenly disappears)

> The government needs to shrink dramatically

Most (but not all) other developed countries have both a larger government and a smaller deficit per capita. A smaller government is not the only solution.

> The top 1% of earners already pay roughly half of all tax revenue, top 10% is roughly 75%.

Do you have sources for this? I was looking for reliable sources on this.

Put another way if your tax rate is 33% and you had to pay the government first.

Then every dollar you earn goes to the government until May 1.

In this scenario if you have to pay govt interest expense first then almost every dollar earned in January would go to paying the debt.

We are spending almost an entire month of everyone’s salary, not on providing anything of value but merely on paying for previous overspending.

Just stumbled across this: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2026-04-16/debunking-a...

>Only 60% of US households earn enough to pay federal income tax.

That's the problem. It's not a spending problem per se, but the market's misallocation of resources. Too many resources are concentrated in too few hands.

That's not to say we should abandon capitalism, but rather we should change the incentives to support higher incomes more broadly, as we did in the 1950s and 1960s. It's not a coincidence that deficit spending/public debt skyrocketed when we cut the top tax brackets. That changed the incentives from encouraging paying good wages and investing in business growth to hoarding capital and the financialization of everything.

Feel free to disagree, but the historical numbers support that.

tl;dr: change the incentives to broaden the distribution of resources across the economy, strengthening the economy (70% of which is consumer spending) and increasing, in a broad-based way, tax revenues.

>We developed chronic overspending habits when interest rates were historically low

Weird, they were historically low because the money printers went brr. So the "We" you're talking about is both Republicans and Democrats, and not much else.

So basically, the interest rate is meaningless, so everything that follows is probably just as meanginless.

>The government needs to shrink

Just because the government makes bad choices doesnt mean whatever fills the vacuum with make good choices.