Any Kid With an Allowance Can Do This Math

A plan you can't read is not a plan — it is a dream.

Yesterday I laid out what the interest is costing us. About $970 billion in fiscal 2025. Twenty-eight hundred dollars a head. Fourteen cents out of every dollar we spend, and a bill you can't reform because there's nothing in it to reform.

Today, what to do about it. And here's where I part company with pretty much everybody in politics.

There are two arguments you'll hear about this, and you'll hear each one delivered as though it's the only answer that exists. One says spending discipline will fix it. The other says raising taxes will fix it.

Neither one will. And the people selling you one of them either haven't done the math or are counting on you not to either.

You don't need a degree in economics to work this out. Any kid who's ever had an allowance can do it in about a minute.

Start with discipline, because it has to come first

People yell about waste, fraud and abuse, and then nobody does anything about any of it. So let's take them one at a time, because they're three different problems with three different fixes.

Fraud is theft. The government already has the tools for that — inspectors general, auditors, prosecutors. The people are already in place and already paid for. All we have to do is let them do their jobs.

Abuse isn't fraud and it isn't theft. Abuse is somebody who found a rule written loose enough to give them room, and took more out of it than anybody intended. You don't catch that with a prosecutor, because nothing illegal happened.

Here's how that gets fixed. Congress is pretty good about handing the executive branch a broad tool and letting the agencies work out how to use it, and then the courts check whether what they came up with is constitutional. That part of the machine works. What's missing is the loop back. We need people whose job is finding the abuse, and then we need Congress to take what the agencies learned about closing it and write it into law.

Because a rule an agency wrote can be undone by a skilled attorney making a good argument in court. EPA rules get overturned on a regular basis, and that's not a scandal — it's the system doing what it's built to do, because an agency rule is an agency's reading of what Congress meant, and a reading can be argued with.

But pass a law that says dumping this into the ground is illegal, and here are the fines, and now there's nothing to argue about. Nobody's interpreting anything. The law says what it says. Judges apply it as written, and appellate judges decide whether the Constitution allows a law written that way to be applied at all. That's the whole question, and it's a much narrower one.

Now waste. And some of the worst of it isn't anybody being careless. It's built into the structure, and Congress built it.

Every federal agency in this country lives under use it or lose it. Spend every dollar you were appropriated, or your appropriation gets cut next year based on what you spent this year. So September comes and agencies buy things they don't need, because the alternative is walking into next year with less money and the same job.

Nobody in that building is stupid. They're doing exactly what the rule rewards.

So change the rule. If you don't spend it, you're funded next year at exactly what you were funded this year. You lose nothing. Save ten million dollars and yes, that ten million goes back to the general fund — but your budget doesn't move. You're whole.

Right now there is no incentive anywhere in the federal government to save a dollar, and Congress is the one that set it up that way. Congress can set it down.

That's the structural piece. Now the arithmetic. I've written the discipline side in detail, and here's what it gives us: somewhere between thirty and fifty billion dollars a year, within four years. Most of that isn't a new idea at all — it's doing what the Inspectors General and the Government Accountability Office have already told us to do, in writing, and nobody did.

Now. Fifty billion against a $1.8 trillion deficit is under three cents on the dollar. At that rate you'd never catch up; the interest alone grows faster than that in a bad year. I'm not going to stand here and tell you I found the answer in the org chart.

But it's a start, and more than that, it's an example. You don't get to ask anybody for more money until you've shown you'll take care of what you already have.

Now the revenue side, and here's the part everybody skips

If you raise taxes without deciding in advance where the money goes, everybody shows up at the door looking for a piece of the new money.

Think about winning the lottery. You sign your name on that check in public, and you collect. Do you honestly believe every relative you've ever had, every friend, every neighbor, isn't calling within three months? Just checking in. Wondering how you're doing. Wondering what's new. And say, listen, while I've got you.

We all know that's human nature. It isn't a character flaw in your cousin. It's what money in the open does to the people around it.

So the person who signs that check ought to be standing at the microphone saying: this much goes to that charity, I'm buying a house for these people, here is where every dollar is going, and I'm done. Say it before anybody asks, and there's nothing left to ask for.

That's what we need Congress to do.

The money we're required by law to spend, we spend. The money we already owe, we pay. And everything that comes in above our actual spending from two years ago goes automatically to paying down the debt. Not by anybody's decision each year. Automatically.

And it takes two-thirds of both chambers to change that rule. That's how we protect it from the next emergency, and from the one after that.

But we the people have to demand it. Nobody in that building is going to propose it on their own, and I'll tell you why.

Why can't Congress do what a sixth grader can do?

Every kid with an allowance finds a way to spend every dollar of it, no matter how hard they're saving for a baseball glove or a bike or a new pair of shoes. There's never quite enough. We've all been that kid.

Sixth graders can do this arithmetic. So why can't Congress?

I don't think they're stupid. And I've stopped believing it's ignorance.

Cutting spending costs you a congressional district. Raising revenue can cost you a primary. Doing both at once costs you both, and you lose your job. And doing neither one costs a politician nothing at all — they hand the bill to the next person who holds the seat, and then complain that the new guy hasn't fixed it.

Those people are so busy keeping their jobs, they're not doing them.

I know how that sounds. But what it really is, is that we built a system where that's the only way to get the job and keep it. If we don't change what the job rewards, they'll keep doing what gets rewarded, like any other human being on this planet.

And in the meantime the bureaucracy keeps growing on its own. There was a man named Parkinson who worked this out in the fifties — organizations add people because adding people is what organizations do, whether or not the work grew. There's a whole rule about it. That's where the spending goes.

None of it works without transparency

And I mean something specific by that word.

If the government doesn't publish this up front, in language a tenth grader can read, in a spreadsheet a tenth grader can sort, then it isn't transparent. It's just technically available.

I can throw a dictionary at you and tell you I taught you English. Doesn't work that way. I can hand you the Encyclopedia Britannica and tell you I've given you the history of the world, but I didn't teach it to you. I didn't make it reachable.

Transparency without accessibility isn't transparency. Accessibility without transparency isn't either. You have to have both at once, or you have neither.

One last thing, about what you're reading

There's no single paper here — nothing I've written, nothing anybody has written — that solves all of this.

I used to be a carpenter. I built houses and highrises. A stick frame house takes hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pieces of lumber. Plates, studs, headers, rafters. And then you have to sheathe all of it. A block house takes thousands of blocks, and it still needs a roof.

You can't throw a block and a bunch of two-by-fours out in a green field and call it a house.

Doesn't work that way.

So understand what these papers are. Each one is a block in the wall. Each one is a base plate, or a header, or a stud, or a rafter, or a piece of sheathing. Put them all together and that's what makes the house.

That's what all these papers are about.

I'm giving this the best I've got. And I'd be grateful to everybody who chimes in to help me make it better.

Ginsburg 2028 • Arc 001 Economy, Cost of Living & Inflation • Morning post — companion to PP_08: Government Spending & the Deficit • presrun2028.net