The country is getting forced by markets into realizing pain for overspending, and only congress can manage this pain. Manage the pain, not remove it is key here. Manage it. Conrgess is totally inept and ridiculously politicized, so it's unlikely they will do anything except make the problem worse. That leaves only the natural fall out of refusing to acknowledge a financial injury before going out on the field to pla…
There is no "overspending." There is only undertaxing. The debt is literally just the accumulated difference between spending and taxation. If extreme wealth was taxed, the debt would be zero. The point isn't even to "pay for spending" but to enforce a functional social contract, and to limit the political and democratic distortions created by extreme inequality. "Markets" should not have a veto on policy in a democr…
France: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/31/france-drops-7...
UK: https://obr.uk/box/effect-of-the-additional-rate-of-income-t...
Sweden: https://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/course/seimAEJ17wealth.pdf
It's interesting to note that even when these tax schemes were repealed, the damage had already been done and the wealth did not return.
Here's a real plan for America:
Step 1: have a tax rate that's a little less than our peers
Step 2: return spending to pre-Covid rates circa 2019