You’ve heard warnings for years about how a fiscal crisis was brewing in the United States because the debt is unsustainable — and financial markets would eventually protest. However, the logic was often vague and the risk hypothetical.
Guess what? The Trump administration has made obvious the real source of risk. It isn’t federal borrowing grinding ever higher. The true risk is our political leaders doing something wildly irresponsible that unnerves financial markets.
President Trump has brought budgetary chaos with extraordinary speed. In just his first week in office, his administration threatened to withhold payments of trillions of dollars of congressionally enacted spending. Days later, he appeared to reverse course. Then he allowed staff members of the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, to gain access to critical Treasury payment systems, prompting the resignation of a senior official with decades…
