The United States has been living on borrowed time and borrowed money. For decades, both parties in Washington have relied on the two bluntest tools in the box, fiscal impulse and monetary impulse, to keep the illusion of strength alive. Massive spending sprees and ultra-loose money from the Fed have propped up the economy like scaffolding around a crumbling building. But the bills are coming due, and the foundation is no longer solid.
Nearly every dollar the government brings in is already spoken for. As of 2024, mandatory spending, things like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, along with interest on the ballooning national debt, now absorbs almost the entire federal revenue stream. There is no budget left for discretionary priorities, let alone emergencies or innovation. We are, in effect, running a government that can no longer govern beyond mailing out checks and paying back creditors.
And those checks? They’re IOUs backed by unfunded liabilities that dwarf anything the public is told. Social Security is short over $60 trillion. Medicare? Another $100 trillion. These aren’t numbers from the future. They are present-value commitments with no funding mechanism in place. The math simply does not work.
Yet there is no adult conversation about it. Every attempt at bipartisan reform is stillborn. Republicans won’t touch benefits. Democrats won’t touch spending discipline. The result is paralysis. So what’s the next move? For Trump, and frankly any future president, it’s increasingly this: get the rest of the world to shoulder the weight. Tariffs. Trade renegotiations. Repricing NATO. Restricting foreign access to American capital. Everything becomes a lever to try and offload the cost of empire onto others.
But there’s a limit to how long the rest of the world will play along. Countries are catching on. They’re hedging. Quietly, bilaterally, they’re moving around the dollar system, signing deals without Washington’s approval, cutting side agreements that leave America out. For now, it’s a trickle. But history tells us trickles become floods.
The metaphor isn’t hard to see. America looks like the old heavyweight champ who still talks a big game but can’t take a punch anymore. The reflexes are there, but the legs are gone. And the crowd is slowly starting to turn away.
If Washington doesn’t address entitlements head-on and soon there’s no recovery arc left. Just a long, slow descent into economic irrelevance and political instability.