The Burthen We Ought to Bear

To the People of the United States:

In No. 1, Faction, and the Fire Not to Be Quenched, I argued that the first thing to fail in a divided republic is the standard itself: each side keeps an honest ledger of the other side’s faults and forgets its own. Nowhere is that ledger easier to read, or more expensive, than in the public debt.

1. The pain point today

In September 2006, the federal government owed the public $4.84 trillion, about 35 percent of the economy. At the end of fiscal year 2025 it owed $30.28 trillion, 99 percent of the economy. By April 2026 the figure was $31.3 trillion, roughly the size of the whole economy. ¹

That debt was not run up by one side. Look at the largest laws of the period. The 2009 recovery act was estimated to add $787.2 billion to deficits. The 2017 tax law was estimated to reduce revenue by $1.5 trillion over ten years. Six COVID-19 relief laws, signed by two Presidents of different parties in 2020 and 2021, were estimated to add $5.037 trillion. The 2025 reconciliation law was estimated to add $3.4 trillion over ten years, before interest, and it raised the debt limit by $5 trillion in the same stroke. ²

Here is the number that should stop you. In fiscal year 2025 the government spent $970.4 billion on net interest and $916.6 billion on national defense. Interest now costs more than the armed forces. ³ The Government Accountability Office projects the debt at a record 106 percent of the economy in 2029 and 123 percent in 2036. The Congressional Budget Office projects net interest rising from 3.3 percent of the economy in 2026 to 6.9 percent in 2056. ⁴

Interest is money spent on decisions already made. Every dollar of it is a dollar the living cannot spend on the living, and a dollar the next generation will spend on us.

2. What they warned

The founders did not agree about debt. That is what makes their warnings worth hearing. They argued from opposite corners and met at the same line.

The Constitution gave Congress the power “To borrow Money on the credit of the United States” ✓ verified, Q01, and it gave no other branch any way around the purse: “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law” ✓ verified, Q02. The Federalist No. 58 called the power over the purse “the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people” ✓ verified, Q03.

The Anti-Federalist Brutus saw where an unlimited borrowing power could lead. “The power to borrow money is general and unlimited” ✓ verified, Q04, he wrote in January 1788. “By this means, they may create a national debt, so large, as to exceed the ability of the country ever to sink. I can scarcely contemplate a greater calamity that could befal this country, than to be loaded with a debt exceeding their ability ever to discharge.” ✓ verified, Q05 His conclusion: “it is unwise and improvident to vest in the general government a power to borrow at discretion, without any limitation or restriction.” ✓ verified, Q06

Hamilton, the great defender of public credit, did not dismiss that fear. He answered it with a rule. The Revolutionary debt, he told Congress in January 1790, “was the price of liberty” ✓ verified, Q07. He rejected the claim that public debts are public benefits as “a position inviting to prodigality and liable to dangerous abuse” ✓ verified, Q08. His maxim, stated in the report’s third person, was “that the creation of debt should always be accompanied with the means of extinguishment. This he regards as the true secret for rendering public credit immortal.” ✓ verified, Q09 Leaving office in 1795, he went further. “A tendency to it is, perhaps, the natural disease of all governments; and it is not easy to conceive any thing more likely than this to lead to great and convulsive revolutions of empire.” ✓ verified, Q10 The duty of public men was to build a system “which may shield posterity from the consequences of the usual improvidence and selfishness of its ancestors” ✓ verified, Q11.

Jefferson came at it from the other side and reached the same place. Writing to Madison from Paris in 1789, he set out the principle “that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living; that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it.” ✓ verified, Q12 From it he drew a rule: “Then no generation can contract debts greater than may be paid during the course of its own existence.” ✓ verified, Q13 In 1798 he wished for “an additional article, taking from the federal government the power of borrowing.” ✓ verified, Q14 In 1816 he called “the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding” ✓ verified, Q15 by its name: it “is but swindling futurity on a large scale.” ✓ verified, Q15

Washington, in the Farewell Address of 1796, put the two halves together. “As a very important source of strength and security, cherish public credit.” ✓ verified, Q16 Then the condition: pay down in peace what war made necessary, “not ungenerously throwing upon posterity the burthen which we ourselves ought to bear. The execution of these maxims belongs to your Representatives” ✓ verified, Q17, he added, but public opinion had to cooperate.

Read those men side by side. The Federalist and the Anti-Federalist, the banker and the farmer, agreed on the essentials. Borrow for a purpose. Attach a plan to pay. Do not hand the bill to people who had no vote on it.

3. How it came true

Hamilton’s maxim asked for the means of extinguishment. None of the large borrowing laws listed above supplied one. Each was scored as adding to deficits. ² The borrowing came in emergencies, which the founders would have understood, and in ordinary years, which they would not.

The debt limit, which was meant to be the brake, became the stage. Congress passes the spending and tax laws first. Then, separately, it votes on whether to let the Treasury borrow the money those laws already require. Since 2001 Congress has changed the limit 22 times. ⁵

In 2011 a House majority of one party and a President of the other ran the limit down to its last days. Treasury used “extraordinary measures” from May. A deal was signed August 2. Three days later Standard & Poor’s lowered the nation’s credit rating from AAA to AA+, citing “political brinksmanship” brief. The Government Accountability Office estimated the delay alone raised borrowing costs by about $1.3 billion that year. ⁵ In 2013 a sixteen-day shutdown and a debt-limit deadline ended in one bill. In 2023 the pattern repeated under the same arrangement of parties: extraordinary measures from January, a Treasury warning that cash would run short by June 5, and a law enacted June 3. In 2025 the limit was raised by $5 trillion inside a reconciliation law, and CRS now reports that borrowing will approach the new limit sometime in fiscal year 2027. ⁵

The ordinary budget broke down alongside it. Appropriations lapsed in 2013 under a President of one party, and in 2018-2019 and 2025 under a President of the other. The 2025 lapse, from October 1 to November 12, was the longest on record, and Homeland Security funding lapsed again in 2026. A Senate subcommittee counted at least $3.7 billion in back pay and $338 million in other costs from just three of those shutdowns. ⁶ When the purse itself stops working, the power to say no to borrowing goes with it. I take up the purse itself, and who holds it, in No. 7.

4. The choke point

Why does a republic that agrees debt is dangerous keep borrowing in good years and bad? Not because its leaders are fools. Because the machine pays them to.

The people who pay are not in the room. The benefit of a deficit arrives now, in this election. The cost arrives later, in someone else’s. Jefferson saw the arithmetic of consent in 1789: a debt that outlives its makers binds people who never agreed to it. In my forthcoming No-America I call the same failure Elite Insulation: “Decision-makers remain shielded from the costs of their decisions while those costs land on people who had no hand in making them.” ✓ verified, S1 A child born this year cannot vote, cannot lobby and cannot donate. In the budget, that child is the one constituent with no voice and the largest share of the bill.

The brake is theater. The debt limit votes on borrowing after the borrowing has been decided. It does not stop a dollar of spending or a dollar of tax cuts. It only stops paying for them, which no responsible member wants, so it becomes a hostage. My term for this is legitimacy theater, the ritual that performs correction while correction stops: “The statement is issued. The committee is formed. The review is conducted. The policy is updated. The underlying architecture remains untouched” ✓ verified, S2. Each standoff looks like restraint. The record shows the limit raised or suspended every time, with the debt larger after each round.

Each side keeps an honest ledger of the other side’s borrowing. One coalition remembers the recovery act and the pandemic spending. The other remembers the tax laws. Both are right about the other, and both forget their own. This is the symmetry collapse I described in No. 1, the standard traveling with the jersey, and my New Declaration of Independence charged both parties with it in so many words: “both sides quietly expand control and spend beyond all limits.” ✓ verified, D1 That is why the Twelve-Word Standard matters here more than almost anywhere. In its longer, working form: “if it would be wrong when they do it, it is wrong when we do it.” ✓ verified, S3 A deficit is not virtuous because your side ran it.

The interest bill is now a power of its own. When interest exceeds defense, the past is spending the present’s money. That is a slow transfer of the power of the purse from the living Congress to every Congress before it.

5. The fix and the prevention

No single reform restores Hamilton’s maxim. Several together can. Each has a cost, and the costs should be argued in the open.

1. Restore the means of extinguishment, by statute. Require that any law scored to add more than a set amount to ten-year deficits either name its offsets or carry a repayment schedule, or else pass on a separate, recorded vote declaring it an emergency. Trade-off: offsets can be gimmicked, and a rigid rule can bind the country in a real crisis. The recorded emergency vote is the safety valve; its cost is that members must own the choice by name.

2. Retire the hostage, keep the brake. Replace the stand-alone debt limit with a limit set automatically by the budget the Congress passes, paired with a debt-to-economy target that triggers automatic restraint when it is breached. Trade-off: the current limit, for all its theater, is one of the few levers a minority has to force a negotiation. Removing it means building the restraint into the budget itself, or there is no restraint at all.

3. Publish the bill to the grandchildren. Require CBO and GAO to report, for every major bill, its cost in added interest and its cost per child born that year, in plain language, on the day of the vote. Trade-off: numbers alone do not change incentives. They change what a member can pretend not to know.

4. Consider an amendment, honestly. The options run from a balanced-budget amendment with a supermajority override for declared war or recession, to a narrower rule that the debt may not rise faster than the economy except by a recorded two-thirds vote. Jefferson wanted the borrowing power gone entirely. Brutus wanted the rule the Confederation had used, requiring “that two thirds of the members should assent to borrowing money” ✓ verified, Q18. Trade-off: a strict balance rule can force cuts in a downturn, when cuts hurt most, and it would draw courts into budget fights. A supermajority rule protects posterity and also hands a determined minority a veto. Choose with eyes open.

5. What you can do. Ask every candidate Hamilton’s question: what is the means of extinguishment? Read the CBO score of the next big bill before you cheer it. Apply the same test to your own side’s plan that you apply to theirs. And remember Washington’s line: the maxims belong to your representatives, but public opinion must cooperate. In No-America I wrote that the work of repair is done by people who know “it is possible that what we do now, we will never personally benefit from.” ✓ verified, S4 That sentence is the whole ethic of paying your own debts.

6. The strongest objection, and the answer

The objection. A nation is not a household. Borrowing in a war, a pandemic or a deep recession is not a vice; it is what credit is for. The founders knew it. The Federalist No. 30 said plainly, “In the modern system of war, nations the most wealthy are obliged to have recourse to large loans.” ✓ verified, Q19 Paine wrote in 1776, “No nation ought to be without a debt. A national debt is a national bond” ✓ verified, Q20. And Madison answered Jefferson’s rule directly in 1790: “Debts may be incurred with a direct view to the interests of the unborn as well as of the living. Such are debts for repelling a Conquest, the evils of which descend through many generations.” ✓ verified, Q21 A growing economy can carry a growing debt. Why treat a tool as a sin?

The answer. The objection is right about the tool and wrong about the record. Every founder quoted here accepted debt for a purpose. Madison’s exception covers debts incurred for the unborn, such as repelling a conquest. Paine, in the same passage, condemned “using posterity with the utmost cruelty; because it is leaving them the great work to do, and a debt upon their backs from which they derive no advantage.” ✓ verified, Q22 Hamilton defended credit precisely so it could be kept, which is why he paired every debt with its repayment.

The test, then, is not whether to borrow. It is whether a debt carries a purpose posterity would approve and a plan to pay it. The record of the last twenty years fails that test in good years as well as bad. A tax cut in an ordinary year and a spending increase in an ordinary year are both borrowing against children for present comfort. And the economy has not outgrown the debt: the debt has grown from about a third of the economy to about all of it, and the interest now outruns defense. A tool that is used every year, in every condition, by every majority, is no longer being used as a tool.

7. Questions for the Candlelight

1. Hamilton and Jefferson disagreed about almost everything. Why do you think they agreed that a debt should come with a plan to pay it?
2. Madison said some debts serve the unborn. Name one federal debt you believe your grandchildren would thank you for, and one you think they would not.
3. Washington said the maxims belong to representatives, but public opinion must cooperate. When did you last reward a representative for voting against your own side’s spending or tax cut?
4. The debt limit has been raised or suspended every time it has bound. Is it a brake, a hostage, or theater? What would a real brake look like?
5. Interest now costs more than national defense. What would you cut, or what would you pay, to change that? Would you accept the same answer from the other party?
6. A child born this year cannot vote on the debt she will carry. Who in our system speaks for her, and how could that voice be made stronger?

Source notes

1. U.S. Treasury, Fiscal Data, “Debt to the Penny” (queried 2026-09-29); Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, FRED series FYGFGDQ188S; Bureau of the Fiscal Service, Financial Report of the U.S. Government, FY2025; GAO, “America’s Fiscal Future.” Via brief 23, “The national debt and its trajectory.” Sources differ slightly on FY2025 debt-to-GDP (Treasury 99%; FRED 97.4% for Q3 2025).
2. CRS R40537 (ARRA, CBO $787.2 billion over FY2009-2019); CRS R45736 (2017 tax law, JCT $1.5 trillion); CRS R46449 (six COVID-19 laws, CBO $5,037 billion: CARES Act $1,721 billion, Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021 $868 billion, American Rescue Plan Act $1,856 billion); CRS R48611 and Senate Budget Committee minority release of 2025-07-21 (P.L. 119-21, CBO $3.4 trillion before interest); CRS IF10292 (debt limit raised $5 trillion). Via brief 23.
3. U.S. Treasury, Monthly Treasury Statement Table 9, FY2025 (record date 2025-09-30); GAO-26-108610. Via brief 23.
4. GAO, “The Nation’s Fiscal Health,” GAO-26-108610 (2026-06-11); CBO long-term budget outlook (March 2026) as quoted by the House Budget Committee chairman (statement of 2026-03-03). Via brief 23. GAO and CBO use different long-term measures (debt held by the public vs. gross debt).
5. CRS R43389, R48209, IN11829, IN12045, IF10292; GAO-12-701 (2011 borrowing cost); Treasury letter of 2023-05-26; House Roll Call 243 (2023) and Senate Vote 146 (2023). Via brief 05, “The debt ceiling standoffs.” S&P’s wording as given in the brief.
6. CRS R41759, R49105, R48930; Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations staff report, “The True Cost of Government Shutdowns” (2019-09-17). Via brief 06, “Government shutdowns.”
7. Supporting answers already published on The Seat: “How should the public debt be managed?” https://civicrealism-ask-api.vercel.app/api/job?id=222af8fb1cabf556 ; “Should every generation be able to rewrite its laws and constitution?” https://civicrealism-ask-api.vercel.app/api/job?id=3ded0ef04911ea35 ; “Why should the federal government assume the states’ debts?” https://civicrealism-ask-api.vercel.app/api/job?id=a52e16ece2ddf03a

Founding-era and constitutional quotations are verified word for word against the Civic Realism founders corpus (passage ids in the table below). Spelling follows the edition in the corpus, including “befal” (Brutus) and “burthen” (Washington).

[S1-S4] Shawn Cosner, No-America (forthcoming; Reading Edition v1.2, unpublished manuscript, 2026). ✓ verified, D1 Shawn Cosner, “A New Declaration of Independence” (December 2025, unpublished).

Quotation verification

How this was checked: every quotation in the body was run through the Founders engine quote check (engine/quotecheck.py, check()) against the cited passage text on the Spark, CPU only, on 2026-10-06: 29 of 29 quotation instances passed (23 from the founders corpus, 4 from No-America, 1 from the Declaration and 1 from brief 05), 0 failed. My own quotations were checked by the same function against the No-America manuscript line or Declaration paragraph cited; the S&P wording against the text of brief 05.

Dropped or trimmed as not clean in the corpus: Washington’s closing clause “but it is necessary that public opinion should cooperate” (the Library of Congress letterbook text carries a footnote marker inside the sentence, and the Ford edition prints a struck-through word there), so Q17 stops at “Representatives” and the rest is paraphrased; Hume’s line that a nation must destroy public credit or public credit will destroy the nation (not found verbatim in the corpus, so not used).