There is a number sitting above every conversation about American governance that nobody in either party wants to own. That number is $36.2 trillion, which is where the national debt stood at the close of fiscal year 2024 according to the U.S. Treasury Department, and it has continued climbing at a rate of roughly $1 trillion every 100 days since. By the time you read this, it is closer to $39 trillion and accelerating.
Here is what makes that number so striking. Neither party is actually treating it as a crisis. Republicans have passed successive rounds of tax cuts that structurally reduce revenue without equivalent spending reductions. Democrats have passed successive rounds of spending programs without equivalent revenue increases. Both parties have agreed, year after year, to raise the debt ceiling rather than address the trajectory. And the voters, exhausted and cynical, have largely concluded that nobody in Washington has any intention of fixing it.
They are not wrong about that. But the reason is worth understanding precisely, because it is not incompetence. It is incentive structure.
Why Does Neither Party Touch the Debt?
The debt is a long-range problem. Its full consequences arrive on a timeline that extends well beyond any election cycle currently on the calendar. The political cost of addressing it, on the other hand, arrives immediately. Cutting spending means cutting programs that have constituencies. Raising taxes means raising taxes on donors. Doing both, which is the only arithmetic that actually closes the gap, means doing both simultaneously inside a system where every decision gets filtered through the question of how it affects the next primary.
No sitting Senator or House member has a structural incentive to take that pain. The reward, a stabilized debt trajectory, accrues to their successors and to the country broadly. The cost, the loss of donor support and voter backlash from the affected programs, falls entirely on them in the next cycle. Inside that incentive structure, deferral is always the rational move.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, interest payments on the existing debt reached $892 billion in fiscal year 2024 and are projected to exceed $1 trillion in fiscal year 2025. To put that in context: America is spending more on interest than on Medicaid. More than on defense spending in many recent budget years. And that figure will approximately double to $2.1 trillion by 2035 based on the CBO’s own long-range projections.
We are paying the price of a decision that was never made and a problem that was never addressed. And the people who were supposed to be making the decision were too busy raising money from the people who benefit from the existing tax and spending structure to make it.
What Has Actually Been Tried?
The Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Balanced Budget Act of 1985 set mandatory deficit reduction targets. Congress waived it. The Budget Enforcement Act of 1990 created pay-as-you-go rules. Congress waived those too. The Budget Control Act of 2011 created automatic spending cuts called sequestration. Congress repeatedly suspended them. The Simpson-Bowles Commission in 2010 produced a bipartisan framework for deficit reduction combining revenue increases and spending cuts. President Obama declined to champion it. Congress ignored it.
Every serious structural attempt to address the debt has been politically neutered before it could take effect. This is not a coincidence. It is a consistent output of a system where the people who would have to absorb the short-term political cost of fiscal discipline are the same people who vote on whether that discipline applies to them.
What Would an Honest Fix Actually Look Like?
The Center Forward Party’s approach to the debt starts from a different premise than either party. We are economically conservative and socially moderately progressive, which means we reject both the supply-side fiction that tax cuts pay for themselves and the progressive fiction that spending programs require no fiscal accounting.
The honest path to a balanced budget involves several things happening simultaneously, none of which are individually novel, but all of which require the political will that the two-party system has structurally prevented from existing:
- Progressive taxation that raises marginal rates on income above $500,000 annually while lowering rates for the middle class, capturing revenue from the segment of the economy where consumption is least affected by tax levels
- Welfare reform that lets recipients work without losing benefits, reducing the long-range cost of the program by enabling exit rather than entrenching dependency
- A mandatory annual review of all active legislation by the Central Apolitical Organization, flagging programs that have stopped delivering outcomes relative to their cost
- Elimination of congressional riders through independent vetting before passage, closing the $27 billion annual hole in the budget that pork-barrel spending creates
- A mandatory competitive bidding requirement on all federal contracts above a defined threshold, verified by the Government Accountability Office
None of these items alone closes a $39 trillion hole. Together, over a ten-year horizon, they put the deficit on a structurally different trajectory. The Specific Goals of the Party page on this site outlines the full fiscal framework in detail.
Does Anyone in Congress Actually Know What They Are Spending?
This is a question that sounds rhetorical. It is not. The federal budget process is genuinely opaque in ways that even informed citizens rarely understand.
Appropriations bills are often thousands of pages long and voted on with hours to read them. Riders, which are clauses added to must-pass spending bills that fund unrelated projects or provide industry-specific tax treatment, are frequently added in the final hours before a vote. The cost projections attached to major legislation are produced by the Congressional Budget Office, which scores what is written in the bill, not what the bill will actually produce in the real world over a decade of implementation.
A bill that reduces the deficit on paper by front-loading revenue and back-loading costs will score as a deficit reducer. Ten years later, the costs arrive and the revenue does not. Nobody is accountable for that gap because the legislators who voted for it may have long since left office.
The Why Paying Politicians More Can Improve Integrity post on this site makes the accountability argument directly. What that post makes plain is that the current salary structure practically requires legislators to spend more time raising money than reading the bills they vote on. When the average Senate race costs $16 million and the salary is $174,000, the arithmetic of legislative attention follows inevitably.
Why a Third Party Is the Only Structural Answer
The reason neither major party can fix the debt is not that their members lack the intelligence to understand it. Many of them understand it extremely well. The reason is that the fix requires a set of decisions that are structurally incompatible with how both parties maintain their power: taxing donors and cutting programs that have constituencies.
A centrist third party that holds the balance of power in Congress does not face the same constraints in the same way. The Center Forward Party’s candidates will not be funded by the same SuperPAC ecosystem that requires legislative protection from tax and spending reform. They will be running explicitly on a platform that treats the $39 trillion debt as the existential fiscal threat it actually is, backed by an independent apolitical body that reviews legislation for cost efficiency and outcome delivery rather than donor compatibility.
The Exhausted Majority of American voters is not ideologically extreme. They want a government that lives within its means, invests in things that work, and stops funding things that do not. That is a centrist position, and it is the position that neither major party can credibly occupy right now.
If you believe the $39 trillion debt is a problem that deserves a serious structural answer, join the Center Forward Party here and help build the political vehicle that can actually deliver one.
