Largely because of emergencies, recessions, and the accelerating cost of entitlement programs, the federal debt stands at its highest level since World War II, relative to the size of the economy. Washington today shows no sign of stemming new red ink. Even with higher inflation, Congress has continued borrowing as if the country were in a deep recession. Worse, on unchanged policies, the Congressional Budget Office predicts debt would nearly double over the next 30 years, propelled by rising Social Security and Medicare spending driving up borrowing and interest payments.
The FreeCon statement elevates this to a frontline policy issue. “The skyrocketing federal debt — which now exceeds the annual economic output of the United States — is an existential threat to the future prosperity, liberty, and happiness of Americans,” it says. “Existential” may be hyperbolic, but the signatories are right to call for urgent action, pledging to build “a constructive reform agenda that can restore America’s fiscal sustainability, ensuring that future generations inherit a more prosperous and secure nation.”
The NatCon statement, by contrast, doesn’t mention the debt, nor does it lay out any conservative principle for managing public finance. Indeed, the only link to the federal budget in their statement at all is the higher spending proposed for rearmament, public research, manufacturing, and family welfare transfers — all things that, absent tax increases or spending reductions elsewhere in the budget, would worsen the debt path.
This relegation of the national debt as a priority is no oversight. The recent 112-page “handbook for conservative policymakers” from public-policy organization American Compass mentions the debt only twice, and then only as a downstream effect of running trade deficits. Prominent national conservatives regularly pooh-pooh efforts to defuse the debt time bomb as an “obsession” of the old Reaganite right (ironic given that their lack of concern is closer to Reagan’s own debt record).
They are also unserious about the debt challenge. NatCon-sympathetic senator J. D. Vance, for example, rails against the prospect of any cuts to Social Security and Medicare — reform of which is near-inevitable to avoid an unprecedented debt explosion. Instead, he claims those who accept this reality “want to cut Social Security … so that we can send more money to Volodymyr Zelensky in Ukraine.”