The next time you sign a mortgage, finance a car, or open a credit-card statement and wonder why the number keeps creeping upward, here is your answer: you are paying a tax that no one in Washington had the nerve to call a tax.
Here is how the bill reaches you: the bond market — the millions of investors who lend the federal government its money — is getting nervous about lending to a government this deep in the red. When they get nervous, they demand higher interest, and the yield on the 10-year Treasury note climbs. That single number quietly sets what you pay on your mortgage, your auto loan, and your credit card. You never saw a ballot. You never got a vote. But the borrowing gets charged to your account all the same.
And what borrowing it is. The federal government is running a deficit of roughly $1.8 to $2 trillion a year — about double the 3% of GDP that even its own Treasury secretary says is the target. The national debt now tops $39 trillion, with interest alone costing about $3 billion every single day. To close that gap, President Trump has assured Americans the books will more or less balance themselves — through tariff revenue, fees on a “Gold Card” visa, the Department of Government Efficiency, and a fraud task force led by Vice President JD Vance. In his own words, if the task force “does really great, we’ll have a balanced budget without having to do anything.” In February he told Congress he could balance the budget “overnight” if his administration found enough fraud.
Overnight. Without having to do anything. That is not a budget plan — it is a wish with a press release attached.
As Libertarians, we believe debt is simply a tax you have not been handed the bill for yet, and that quietly handing it to your children is the most cowardly tax of all. The nationalLibertarian Party platform says it plainly: “Government should not incur debt, which burdens future generations without their consent.” We support a Balanced Budget Amendment — balanced, as the platform insists, “exclusively by cutting expenditures, and not by raising taxes.”
Look at what the borrowing already costs before a single new program is dreamed up. Last year the federal government spent more than $1 trillion just servicing its debt — more than it spent on the entire military. That is money that buys nothing, builds nothing, and defends no one. It is not a road, not a school, not a soldier. It is the rent we now pay on decades of spending we were never asked to approve — and the Government Accountability Office has already called the path “unsustainable.”
Before anyone in the other two parties nods along, understand that this is their monument, jointly built. Republicans campaign on “small government” and then vote for it by the trillion. Democrats have suddenly discovered their inner deficit hawk — running ads about the rising cost of borrowing while their own party stacked its share of the pile. The debt is not a Trump problem or a Biden problem. It is a Washington problem, signedby both hands.
We said as much back in 2017, when Republicans passed tax cuts without the spending cuts to match: “Americans can’t avoid paying the bill that Congress racks up in their name.” We were right then. The bill came due — with interest.
They will tell you the fix is “waste, fraud, and abuse,” that a task force and a few canceled subscriptions will somehow close a $2 trillion gap. But the two old parties have argued for years about whether you can shrink the deficit just by chasing fraud, and the arithmetic has never once cooperated. This isn’t a rounding error you can audit away. It is a spending problem, lodged in the entitlement and military programs that make up theoverwhelming bulk of the budget — the very programs both parties have sworn never to touch. Everything else is theater.
We call on Congress to stop performing fiscal responsibility and start practicing it: pass a Balanced Budget Amendment, enact real rescissions instead of rebranding old ones, andcut spending until the government lives within the means you granted it. The only open question is whether Washington trims spending on purpose — or whether the bond market does it for them, the hard way, on its own brutal schedule.
Until then, keep an eye on that loan payment. The number creeping upward is the sound of a bill coming due: a tax you never voted for, on a debt you never agreed to, run up by agovernment that swore it could all be fixed overnight.
In Liberty,
Evan McMahon
Chair, Libertarian National Committee
Chair, Libertarian Party