Pushing back against the big Medicaid lie



Democrats were virtually salivating as they unanimously voted against Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act ahead of the Independence Day holiday, which certainly should give pause to Republicans as they prepare for the midterms and the 2028 elections beyond.

What gives the Democrats hope that they can campaign effectively against Trump’s mega-bill? Is it the fact that Republicans were able to make permanent the 2017 tax cuts? Are they planning to campaign against the “no tax on tips” provision that even Kamala Harris supported? Will they claim that funding border security and mass deportation of illegal aliens is somehow bad for the country?

Remember, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act is the codification of the agenda that President Trump ran on in 2024. It’s not tricky. It’s not nefarious.

No, no, and no. Democrats are not idiots. They know that they have the short straw on all of those 80-20 issues. So they are going back to the same issue they have demagogued since 2008 — health care. By tugging on the heartstrings of the American public, they know they can use fear to win votes.

Demagoguing Medicaid ... again

During debate in both the House and Senate, Democrats relied on questionable forward-looking interpretations of the impact of the mega-bill on Medicaid to claim that nearly 12 million low-income people would lose health coverage if the bill passed, as it ultimately did.

The left-leaning Congressional Budget Office supplied some of that data, and by the time the vote was finalized on July 3, various other groups were adding fuel to the fire. KFF, formerly the Kaiser Family Foundation, added the 12 million people who would allegedly lose Medicaid to the five million who KFF claimed would lose coverage in the Affordable Care Act marketplace, concluding that at least 17 million would be at risk. Then, there was the claim that Trump’s budget would deny food stamps to hungry children and pregnant women.

But not so fast. Despite the bleak picture painted by Democrats and weak-kneed RINOs that Trump wanted poor people to just die and be done with it, there were reasonable explanations for all the budget changes that had nothing to do with genocide.

Reductions in Obamacare premium subsidies are just an acknowledgment that the COVID crisis is over, and those boosted premiums are no longer necessary. Likewise, food stamps are still going to be provided to the disabled, families with young children, and the impoverished elderly, even if Democrats want to pretend otherwise.

And pretend they will, so if Republicans want to prevail in future elections, they had better fully understand the truth about the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, because otherwise, they will be painted as heartless elitists who want their fellow Americans to die by the millions.

Telling the truth

Fortunately, the road map is already clear on how to respond to the demagoguery of the Democrats, and it was modeled by two members of the Trump administration on the Sunday morning talk shows over the long holiday weekend.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council, faced down their hostile questioners on CNN’s “State of the Union” and CBS’ “Face the Nation” respectively.

Bessent, who by all accounts is the most competent member of Trump’s Cabinet, immediately pushed back on Dana Bash’s supposition that the bill would cut benefit programs like Medicaid:

Only in D.C. is a 20% hike over 10 years a cut. Medicaid funding will go up 20% over the next 10 years. The people who Medicaid was designed for — the pregnant women, the disabled, and families with children under 14 — will be refocused. The able-bodied Americans are not vulnerable Americans, so a work requirement or a community service requirement, that’s very popular with the public.

Bessent then struck a blow against the argument that millions of Americans will lose their Medicaid coverage because they didn’t remember to reapply for benefits under the new rules.

“It is a group of Democrats who unfortunately seem to think that poor people are stupid,” he said. “I don’t think poor people are stupid. I think they have agency, and I think to have them register twice a year for these benefits is not a burden. But these people who want to infantilize the poor and those who need these Medicaid benefits are alarmist.”

RELATED: The budget hoax that nearly sank Trump’s biggest win (so far)

  Photo by Tom Brenner For the Washington Post via Getty Images

Over on “Face the Nation,” Hassett was interviewed by Weijia Jiang, senior White House correspondent for CBS. She dutifully recited the claim that 12 million people would lose their Medicaid coverage, but Hassett struck back hard:

Let’s unbundle that a little bit. What we are actually doing is asking for a work requirement, but the work requirement is that you need to be looking for work or even doing volunteer work, and you don’t need to do it until your kids are 14 or older, so the idea that that’s going to cause a massive hemorrhaging in availability of insurance doesn’t make a lot of sense. And if you look at the CBO numbers, if you look at the numbers they say are going to lose insurance, about five million of those are people who have other insurance. ... If they lose one, they’re still insured.

Hassett also explained that the best way to get insurance is to get a job, and so if the Trump economy stimulates growth, it will help people to happily leave Medicaid after they gain employment.

On another question, about whether the One Big Beautiful Bill Act is harmful because it grows the national debt by between $3 trillion and $5 trillion over the next 10 years, Hassett responded by reminding the reporter that the Congressional Budget Office is underestimating growth in the economy compared to what happened in the first Trump term pre-COVID. Based on that historical record, Hassett expects the debt to actually shrink by $1.5 trillion in the next decade.

What Hassett didn’t say, but which should be on the lips of every Republican defending their votes for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, is that over the 10 years from 2014 to 2024, the federal debt increased by more than $17.5 trillion. Admittedly, Trump’s first term played a role in that thanks to COVID, but only Trump and Republicans are making any effort today to shrink the debt. If left up to Democrats, every social program in the budget would see increased funding, deficit be damned.

Fight fear with facts

To summarize, here are the talking points that every Republican candidate for Congress must master if they hope to beat back Democrat distortions:

  1. Republicans voted to increase Medicaid spending over the next 10 years by 20%.
  2. Republicans voted to preserve Medicaid for the needy by making sure that everyone using the program’s valuable resources is truly needy — and eligible.
  3. Republicans voted to create an economy where more people can get jobs that provide high-quality health insurance. Emphasize this: Jobs are good.
  4. Republicans treat Medicaid recipients with dignity, asking them to follow simple rules to qualify for the benefit, rather than treating them as helpless wards of the state.
  5. Republicans are bending the curve downward on the national debt. Even if the CBO is right that the debt will increase by $3.5 trillion over the next 10 years, that increase is only 20% of what it was over the previous 10 years. And the Trump tax cuts are expected to stimulate the economy, so the national debt should actually decrease.

Those will do for a start. Remember, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act is the codification of the agenda that President Trump ran on in 2024. It’s not tricky. It’s not nefarious. And if it is unpopular, that’s only because Democrats have been lying about it.

Now, it’s up to Republicans to fight back against the big Medicaid lie, or else pay the price for their silence.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.

The budget hoax that nearly sank Trump’s biggest win (so far)



Conservatives are celebrating a once-in-a-generation legislative triumph with the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law on July 4 by President Trump. But the victory almost didn’t happen — thanks to what can only be described as the “budget hawk hoax,” a long-standing tactic used by phony conservatives to block meaningful reforms from becoming law.

The heart of this hoax is that the overriding problem facing America is “the deficit crisis” — and that nothing else on the conservative agenda can ever be moved forward until we deal with it.

Too many conservatives have fallen for the 'budget hawk hoax' for far too long.

But when the conversation turns to cutting wasteful spending, these same so-called budget hawks introduce a poison pill: the notion that the only serious way to reduce the deficit is by gutting Social Security and Medicare — before touching any other government waste.

They know this is a nonstarter — and we all know it’s a nonstarter — because there is no way voters will ever allow Nana’s Social Security to be cut while we’re still using taxpayer money to fund LGBTQ+ programs in Nepal and Botswana.

The impossible dream?

Even worse, the faux-conservative “budget hawks” have generally dismissed any efforts to cut other wasteful government spending, insisting that it would have been a mere insignificant drop in the bucket. Yet when President Trump tried to secure $5 billion in funding for the border wall in his first term, budget hawks protested that we couldn’t afford it.

When the Trump administration began dismantling corrupt NGOs under USAID, legacy “conservative” media scoffed at the effort because it didn’t yield massive dollar savings. Yet if we don’t eliminate such foundational waste first, long-term entitlement reform has no credible path forward.

The truth is, of course, that Conservatism Inc. was just desperately trying to protect the corrupt status quo, keep left-wing spending in place, and deny any spending that advances the conservative agenda.

The same old playbook was rolled out again with the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Critics labeled it “budget-busting,” but that claim was misleading. The bill didn’t increase spending. In fact, it prevented a scheduled tax hike that would have rolled back Trump-era tax cuts and restored pre-2017 rates.

RELATED: The reality behind this week’s One Big Beautiful Bill spectacle

  BackyardProduction via iStock/Getty Images

To be fair to the bill’s critics, the history of omnibus bills is fraught with corruption. Typically, omnibus bills have been legislative horse trades: Republicans secure pork for their districts, and Democrats secure massive expansions of the welfare state. But the One Big Beautiful Bill Act is different. It actually slashes major government spending in ways that align with long-standing conservative demands.

For instance, the $7,500 federal incentive for electric vehicle purchases is set to expire almost immediately. Under the old playbook, such a subsidy would have increased in exchange for some infrastructure funding in a red district. Not this time.

By trying to defeat the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, “budget hawks” were actually striving to protect and perpetuate the following left-wing agenda items, all in the name of “fiscal conservatism”:

  • A massive tax increase, restoring Obama-level tax rates.
  • Allowing able-bodied Medicaid recipients to continue taking welfare without being required to work.
  • Maintaining all the federal EV rebates and green energy incentives, which are designed to deny Americans the right to affordable energy and reliable transportation.
  • Blocking border security by denying funding for the border wall, additional detention centers, and additional Border Patrol staffing.

It’s even more obscene when you consider the enormous cost to taxpayers of providing social services for illegal aliens — services the “budget hawks” are trying to save — while also perpetuating open borders because “we can’t afford” measures to seal the border.

Too many conservatives have fallen for the “budget hawk hoax” for far too long, accepting that we cannot have any conservative victories so long as we have a national debt. Perhaps that day has finally ended.

Yes, our country’s fiscal crisis is real, and it will persist. But forsaking any victories over the left because of the deficit is not a matter of high principle. It’s simply surrender.

The “budget hawks” will never be able to fix the deficit. They don’t want to. But given the chance, they would continue to use the issue to prevent real conservatives from ever passing useful legislation.

The hoax failed

They lost this round — and thank heaven for that!

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act stops income tax hikes in their tracks. It strips funding from Planned Parenthood, rogue judges notwithstanding. It shuts down the EV grift. It tightens border security and reins in Medicaid fraud.

This is what winning looks like — and the self-styled “budget hawks” hate it. Why? Because it derails the left’s agenda and puts the public back in charge.

Credit goes to President Trump and Speaker Johnson for delivering this landmark victory. And to Stephen Miller — relentless as ever — for making sure the truth broke through.

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Mark Milley’s legacy: Gridlock, dead zones, and lost time



In just a few months, the Trump administration has secured major wins for Americans by cutting bloated government, tightening border security, and reasserting U.S. strength abroad.

Now, as its economic agenda gains momentum, the administration is turning its focus toward repatriating wealth and boosting consumer confidence. Supporting the working class will also require renewing the president’s tax cuts — an essential step for sustaining growth and addressing the budget deficit and national debt.

Trump and his team are committed to breaking through the bureaucratic inertia and exposing outdated policy that blocks American competitiveness.

One practical way to pay down that debt is to auction off portions of the communications spectrum — America’s wireless airwaves — to competitive American companies. These firms have built out the high-speed networks we rely on every day. Spectrum auctions have already generated more than $258 billion for the U.S. Treasury. Yet, huge swaths of this valuable asset remain tied up in federal hands.

The last major spectrum auction, conducted under Trump’s first term, raised $22.4 billion. Since then, progress has stalled. The Department of Defense has refused to budge — blocking further releases of spectrum needed to expand 5G access and innovation.

That stonewalling was shaped in part by the rigid posture of former Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley, who was criticized for backchannel communications with China and accused by President Trump of “treason.” Milley’s legacy of obstruction still casts a shadow over spectrum policy.

No one disputes the need for a strong, modern military. But the Pentagon’s refusal to share spectrum is hurting U.S. economic leadership. The benefits of 5G — greater efficiency, higher speed, and lower latency — depend on unlocking new constellations of network equipment that amplify wireless performance and shrink infrastructure costs.

China understands this. It has deployed the world’s largest 5G network and allocated more than 370% more spectrum than the U.S. It recently became the first country to reach 1 billion 5G connections. At the same time, Beijing has backed cybercriminals and hostile actors that target American infrastructure. The stakes are high — and the risks are real.

Instead of expanding spectrum access to keep pace, the U.S. Defense Department — under Milley’s watch and beyond — has distracted network developers with a “dynamic sharing framework.” This alternative relies on the Citizens Broadband Radio Service, marketed as a new frontier and “fertile ground” for wireless innovation.

In theory, it sounds promising. In practice, the system is riddled with inefficiencies. CBRS simply cannot meet the demands of the next wave of commercial and defense innovation. By clinging to bureaucratic workarounds, the government is slowing progress — and putting the U.S. further behind.

Independent experts have warned that the low broadcast power levels mandated in the CBRS spectrum severely limit performance. Users far from a cell tower face degraded service, while lower-priority operators may get no protection from interference and suffer from chronic congestion. Despite official spin, analysts report little to no meaningful investment or innovation from commercial players.

These dead-end designs stem in part from Milley’s resistance during his tenure to serious discussions about spectrum reform. But this stagnation has allies, even now that he’s gone.

Before the full scope of CBRS’ flaws became clear, cable industry operators placed big bets on it. They hoped new use cases would emerge, but soon realized CBRS couldn’t deliver on its promises. Rather than pivot to better broadband solutions, the cable lobby launched a campaign — “Spectrum for the Future” — aimed at locking competitors into these same flawed systems. The result: lobbying to preserve the status quo while freezing the wireless industry’s progress toward faster, more scalable infrastructure.

The United States cannot afford to cling to the illusion that military control of technology alone secures national strength. Commercial innovation is just as critical. President Trump understands this. As he moves his agenda forward, he and his team are committed to breaking through the bureaucratic inertia and exposing outdated policy that blocks American competitiveness.

We need to unleash more of our nation’s spectrum for commercial use. Anything less weakens consumers at home and cedes technological dominance abroad.

How Democrats use health care alarmism to cling to power



When the sky’s red at night, we’re in for mild weather. When Punxsutawney Phil sees his shadow, we’re in for six more weeks of winter. And when Democrats start losing, we’re in for a lot of fearmongering about health care.

Rep. Al Green’s (D-Texas) outburst during President Trump’s address to Congress last week was the latest example of Democratic health care alarmism. The Texas congressman waved his cane and shouted that Trump had “no mandate” to cut Medicaid before the sergeant-at-arms escorted him from the floor. The House later censured him for the disruption. Though Green is known for his dramatic antics, this was part of a well-established tradition.

Republicans’ budget resolution is a good step in that direction, but they’ll need to work on their messaging to hold onto their House majority long enough to make a real difference.

In 2017, Republicans controlled the House, Senate, and presidency, positioning them to fulfill their 2010 promise to repeal and replace Obamacare. The proposed American Health Care Act aimed to modify key aspects of the law while preserving others, but it ultimately failed in the Senate.

The Affordable Care Act, signed by President Obama, barred insurers from denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions or charging them higher premiums. While intended to protect vulnerable patients, the policy led to higher premiums for everyone, including those already struggling to afford health care.

Republicans proposed a different solution: letting the states place people with pre-existing conditions into “high-risk pools,” allowing insurers to charge them high premiums, and providing government subsidies to offset those costs. The chronically ill could access the care they needed without driving up costs for everyone.

More doom, more gloom

This all sounds fairly tame and technocratic, but if you watched Democrats’ campaign ads leading up to the 2018 midterms, you’d get the impression that Donald Trump and then-House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Ohio) had personally executed every cancer-ridden grandma in the country. About half of the party’s ads that cycle focused on health care, especially the issue of pre-existing conditions.

And it worked. Democrats picked up 41 seats, ending Trump’s trifecta.

In 2022, Democrats were polling badly in the lead-up to that year’s midterms. Joe Biden was unpopular, the Afghanistan withdrawal had become a national embarrassment, and inflation was out of control. Right on cue, health care hysteria commenced.

Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) laid out an 11-point plan for that election cycle, which included a proposal that — in his words — “all federal legislation should sunset in five years” unless Congress repassed it. While this proposal probably wouldn’t have had much effect other than creating more work for Congress, Democrats saw their chance and pounced.

Then-Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) claimed Scott’s proposal would “end Medicare and Social Security and Medicaid.” The Democratic National Committee flooded the airwaves with the same alarmism.

That November, Democrats managed to hold down their losses in the House and even expanded their Senate majority. While it would be an overstatement to attribute their strong performance to health care alarmism alone, it certainly didn’t hurt.

History repeating?

Today, the Democrats find themselves in a similarly precarious situation. Republicans, once again, have a trifecta, and Trump is basking in the best approval ratings of his political career. Democrats have so far failed to marshal an effective resistance or even settle on a cohesive message — so they’re breaking out the old playbook.

Green’s theatrics about proposed Medicaid cuts attracted plenty of attention, but his fellow Democrats are starting to parrot the same talking points. Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) recently warned that House Republicans’ plan “could take health care away from up to 25 million Americans.”

In reality, this is just more fearmongering. Advocates of socialized medicine like Wendell Potter, who quit his job as a Cigna executive to shill for single-payer health care, insist that expanding Medicaid is simply “the right thing to do.” Even though ironically, he also explained elsewhere how insurers turn Medicaid into their own personal piggy bank.

Sticking millions of more people on Medicaid — including illegal immigrants, if some Democrats have their way — hurts the very people it’s designed to help. Since Obama raised the eligibility threshold to 138% of the poverty line, the result has been overcrowding, provider shortages, and massive cost overruns.

It would be very convenient if lawmakers could fix American health care by throwing more money at it, but that’s simply not the case. Comprehensive reforms are needed to tackle systemic issues of waste, fraud, and inefficiency.

Republicans’ budget resolution is a good step in that direction, but they’ll need to work on their messaging to hold onto their House majority long enough to make a real difference. Otherwise, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) will ride a blue wave of health care alarmism straight to the speaker’s chair in 2026.

‘Waste, fraud, and abuse’ hype masks the real issue: Entitlement bloat



It’s the oldest trick in Republicans' playbook: They campaign on cutting spending and shrinking government, but when it comes time to pass actual legislation, they increase spending instead. To distract from that reality, they point to “waste, fraud, and abuse.”

Listen closely to all the hype about the DOGE — the Elon Musk-inspired, unofficial Department of Government Efficiency — and you’ll find nobody proposing to eliminate or structurally reform any major programs. Instead, leaders are giving Americans the impression that we can solve our inflation and debt crisis by trimming foreign aid, selling vacant buildings, and slashing overpayments in programs where waste and fraud are features, not bugs. This time must be different.

Cute messaging about egregious wasteful spending, which offends no corporate or individual constituency, will not solve the current crisis.

On the upside, an unprecedented conservative media campaign, led by Musk, has spotlighted wasteful spending and the need for cuts. On the downside, despite all the social media buzz, no one has presented a serious plan to reduce, eliminate, or restructure the key programs driving deficits and inflation. In fact, in December's budget bill, Musk and Donald Trump backed an additional $110 billion in deficit spending without using any so-called wasteful programs as offsets.

Recycling the idea of cutting “waste, fraud, and abuse” — “no, really this time!” — might have worked before the $7 trillion COVID-19 debt bomb. But it won’t dent the $1.2 trillion in annual money printing needed to service the debt’s interest. Telling Americans we can achieve fiscal solvency simply by cutting painless waste, reducing foreign aid, or making government more “efficient” sets us up for failure.

The only way to curb inflation is to level with Americans about the real source of the problem: consensus spending by both parties, not the “waste, fraud, and abuse” they keep blaming. Either we cut those programs or accept inflation — no middle ground. The silver lining is that inflation’s bite has created a mandate to make a trade-off: We can end dependency on certain programs if we muster the political will.

We don’t need an AI tool or a latter-day Manhattan Project to figure out how to balance the budget. We already know what must be done; the challenge lies in devising the right messaging and political will to enact it.

The federal budget isn’t a mystery. According to the Congressional Budget Office, fiscal year 2025 will bring another $2 trillion deficit, with $7 trillion in spending and $5 trillion in revenue — and that’s before factoring in any expansion of Donald Trump’s first-term tax cuts. The CBO projects $1.1 trillion in interest on the debt, but those figures have repeatedly been revised upward.

The 10-year outlook appears even bleaker, especially once we factor in the CBO’s unrealistic revenue projections, its consistent underestimates of spending, and its failure to account for major catastrophes — such as COVID-19, the Great Recession, or annual weather disasters — that always push deficits beyond expectations. For example, while the CBO estimates the $7 trillion budget will only rise to $10.3 trillion by the end of the 10-year window, our spending has already doubled over the past decade, largely because of COVID-19.

What, then, drives our $7 trillion budget for fiscal 2025? Let’s break down the major government expenditures.

The “untouchables” of our budget make up the overwhelming majority of the tab. Social Security, Medicare, military, and veterans’ programs (both discretionary and mandatory), plus interest on the debt, total more than $5.2 trillion of the $7 trillion budget. Several hundred billion dollars of Medicare is offset by user premiums, bringing the net “untouchable” spending closer to $5 trillion. Yes, one could shave off some Pentagon waste and address Social Security and Medicare overpayments, but tightening eligibility would spark a political backlash that Trump may not want.

No hidden stockpile of “waste, fraud, and abuse” exists to eliminate. The only way to lower the deficit is to target the remaining $2 trillion, which includes discretionary spending and nonuniversal entitlement programs such as Medicaid, food stamps, and housing.

Republicans will also need to devolve education, agriculture, transportation, and energy spending to the states. They must eliminate housing subsidies and mortgage giants like Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. In other words, they must convince the American people that the choice is between dependency programs or permanent stagflation and unaffordability. Cute messaging about egregious wasteful spending, which offends no corporate or individual constituency, will not solve our current crisis. Honesty remains the only viable path forward.

Republicans should craft their reconciliation bill to fully repeal the Green New Deal and all climate regulations, reset discretionary spending to pre-COVID-19 levels, and enact welfare reform stronger than the 1996 measure. Some commentators falsely claim Social Security and Medicare are the only paths to reducing deficits, neglecting the many “other mandatory spending” programs that are not universal. Coupled with substantial health care reforms to lower consumer costs, this approach offers the only realistic way to address inflation.

Congress cannot focus solely on tax cuts this time. Yes, lawmakers should extend the 2017 tax cuts and add targeted cuts to spur small-business growth, but unlike in 2017, the primary emphasis should be on curbing government spending. A frank discussion about the true nature of these expenditures is essential to meet the mandate of lowering inflation at long last.

Restore self-government by handing debt power to states



Donald Trump last week shocked Congress by demanding that the debt limit either be abolished or at least suspended during his presidency — a stance typically championed by Democrats. While the plan, thankfully, has been shelved for now, there might be a way for conservatives to turn this political lemon into lemonade. What if Congress eliminated the debt limit in the much-anticipated budget reconciliation bill but did so in a way that tackled the debt itself rather than the ceiling?

Want to restore relevance to state legislatures and self-government while addressing the debt crisis? Consider putting the states in charge of managing the debt. The idea might not be as far-fetched as it sounds.

As part of the upcoming reconciliation bill, Congress could implement a rule requiring that the debt limit cannot be raised unless two-thirds of state legislatures approve.

We are no longer a self-governing people. Politics today reveals a troubling reality for both the right and the left: Our government no longer operates of, by, for, or in response to the people. The cause lies in the dismantling of the federalist system created by the Constitution. Instead of states representing the people in federal government, the entire arrangement has been turned upside down.

The states have become a joke, a bunch of shleppers doing the bidding of the federal government and groveling for its attention and money. Our founders envisioned the need for localism when America was a relatively homogenous group of just 3 million people. How much more so now with 340 million very diverse individuals and communities?

From a liberal and conservative perspective, restoring the balance of power the founders intended requires flipping the tables. Few solutions achieve this better than devolving debt authority to the states, an idea first proposed by the Goldwater Institute and recently promoted by Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.) on my podcast.

Putting the states in the driver’s seat

Empowering the states through this transformational reform will strengthen self-governance. It will make state and local elections more relevant, align state governments with the priorities of their people, and hold the federal government more accountable.

States and local governments have lost influence because they collect only $3.5 trillion in revenue combined, while the federal government collects $5 trillion in one central pot. The federal government then returns about $1.1 trillion to the states, burdened with conditions and distortions that leave state officials unable to control their own destinies.

The federal government collects most of its revenue from the wealthy, leaving half the country indifferent to reining in federal overreach. Meanwhile, the truly wealthy accept their burden, content to pay what amounts to a bribe for maintaining their status. At this point, we might as well hand our money to the King of England. These funds bear no connection to self-governance or the character of our communities and epitomize the “taxation without representation” that sparked the war for independence.

In recent years, much of this revenue hasn’t even come from taxes but from money printing to service the interest on the debt through treasury auctions. This practice has burdened Americans with an even worse tax — long-term, intractable inflation. What if we shifted control of the printing presses to the states, placing them firmly in the driver’s seat?

Empowering grassroots conservatives

As part of the upcoming reconciliation bill, Congress could implement a self-imposed rule requiring that the debt limit cannot be raised unless two-thirds of state legislatures approve. Even a 26-state threshold would demand agreement from several Republican-controlled chambers for every Democratic-controlled chamber to raise the limit. This approach wouldn’t delegate Congress’ appropriations authority to the states but would instead impose a self-restraint, limiting federal spending without state approval to raise the cap.

Currently, Democrats fully control both legislative chambers in only 18 states. Even a simple majority-rule requirement would still need approval from eight GOP-controlled states or chambers to lift the debt ceiling. Shifting this power to state legislatures would bring the debate over the federal government’s scope to a local level, empowering conservative grassroots movements to wield a veto over excessive spending. It would also make state legislators key players in Congress’ most critical decisions, in effect serving as a backdoor repeal of the 17th Amendment.

Over time, this plan would compel states to take control of their own futures and permanently reduce the size of the federal government. Once states take the lead on managing the debt, the conservative vision of states fully overseeing health care, transportation, education, and agriculture could become a reality.

Civil society established the states, and the states established the federal government. Many of today’s public policy problems arise from flipping this governance on its head. Granting states authority over the debt limit could address not only the federal spending crisis but also fix the broader dysfunction of the federal government in a single, systemic move. Now, we need elected officials with the courage to champion this or other bold ideas to promote localism. It’s not too late to include this reform in next year’s most important bill.

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