The last few weeks have made clear that we’ve spent far too long talking about the wrong things in the wrong way. Instead of seeing the federal government for what it chiefly is – the world’s largest business, spending more than $6 trillion every year – we have turned it into a debating society for emotionally charged claims about woke culture and populism. Both parties have been happy to expend much of their energy demonizing the other because they saw partisan anger as a pathway to power – and because it is much easier to grandstand on inflammatory talking points than to make the hard choices required to smoothly operate such a massive entity. As a result, we became like farmers arguing over the best use of their land while their crops were withering.
That is how our unsustainable national debt has reached $36.5 trillion, gravely threatening our future. ...
What Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency are making clear is that as much as our perilous financial situation has been bandied about, we have spent little time actually digging into the numbers behind it.
