Now you do it

Before anything is pulled, the line goes to 176 per cent of GDP by 2056 and is still climbing when the chart runs out of paper. That is not a forecast of catastrophe. It is current law, executed faithfully, by a government that never once takes a vote it has not already taken. Doing nothing is a decision, and it is the most expensive one on the menu.

The first thing the plate proves

Turn on Only cuts. That is every spending option CBO has scored — all 19 of them, at once, each taken at CBO’s most aggressive estimate. Defence trimmed, the non-defence side trimmed, federal pay held down, Medicare premiums up, Medicare Advantage repriced, hospital payments made site-neutral, Social Security re-indexed and the retirement age raised. Nobody has ever passed anything close to that list. It is not a programme; it is a fantasy in which every interest group in the country loses on the same afternoon.

It saves $6.06 trillion over the ten-year window and leaves the debt at 124 per cent of GDP in 2056. The line still never stops rising. Not once, not in any year, not by a tenth of a point.

That is the sentence worth sitting with. There is no arrangement of scored spending cuts that stabilises the federal debt. Not a hard one, not a cruel one — none. Anyone who tells you the books close on the spending side alone is either not holding CBO’s list or is counting on you not to.

The second thing

Now turn on Only taxes — every revenue option, at CBO’s middle estimate, not its most aggressive. It closes. Debt peaks and falls to 70 per cent by 2056.

This is not an argument that taxes are the answer. It is an observation about the size of the two menus. The spending side of the budget is mostly benefits owed to named people under permanent law, and the scoreable ways to pay them less are small, slow and politically radioactive. The revenue side is a base riddled with exclusions, preferences and a missing consumption tax that every peer country levies. The asymmetry is not ideological. It is arithmetic, and it is why every serious commission of the last forty years came back with both columns filled in.

The house path

A newspaper that only says what will not work is a coward. So: The house path is Sleyor’s own answer, on the record, arguable. It is 3.2 per cent of GDP — $11.6 trillion over the window — about three-fifths revenue and two-fifths spending. Not one component is set to CBO’s harshest estimate. The debt peaks at 101 per cent, stops rising in 2028, and is back to 76 per cent by 2056 — below where it stood before the pandemic.

Its rules were simple. Broaden a base before raising a rate. Take health savings out of price — what the government pays a hospital, a plan, a drug programme — rather than out of eligibility. Touch Social Security at the top of the benefit scale and at the inflation index rather than at the age floor alone. Cut defence and non-defence discretionary by the same proportion, because a party that will only cut the other side’s half is not cutting. And carry every one of them at a setting that a real Congress could plausibly vote for on a bad Tuesday.

It will still make you angry somewhere. That is the point. Every path that works makes everyone angry somewhere, and the ones that make nobody angry are the ones that end at 176 per cent.

Interest is not a lever

You will notice there is no switch for interest. There cannot be. Interest is what the debt costs, and the debt is what the choices leave behind, so it is solved rather than chosen — each year’s borrowing is priced at the effective rate implied by CBO’s own baseline and fed into the next year’s balance. This is why the line moves further than the savings you pulled. Cut a dollar in 2028 and you also do not borrow it, do not pay interest on it in 2029, and do not pay interest on that interest in 2030. Delay a dollar and the same machinery runs in the other direction. The plate is honest about compounding in both directions, which is the single most common thing missing from budget arguments conducted out loud.

What this is, exactly

The baseline is CBO’s, taken from its published projection spreadsheets: GDP, revenues, and spending by category as shares of GDP, out to 2056. The starting debt is CBO’s. The interest rate path is derived from CBO’s own net interest and debt figures rather than assumed. Running the engine with no levers pulled reproduces the debt path CBO prints to within 0.83 points of GDP in 2056, the worst year of thirty-one. If it did not, the plate would have no business being on the page.

The options are CBO’s Options for Reducing the Deficit, verbatim titles and verbatim ten-year scores. Where CBO scored a range of severities, the slider moves between CBO’s own low and high; it does not go past either end. Where CBO scored a single number, there is no slider. Options that would be scored against the same tax base or the same programme are marked as overlapping and cannot both be counted.

Two honest caveats. CBO’s scores run ten years and the chart runs thirty, so beyond the window each option is held at its own average share of GDP — that extrapolation is ours. And CBO’s conventional scores hold the economy fixed; a package of this size would move growth, in directions economists argue about, and nothing here pretends to settle that argument.

Congressional Budget Office — The Budget and Economic Outlook: 2026 to 2036, long-term budget projections (Supplemental Table 1, extended baseline, percentage of GDP) — source, published 2026-02-11, retrieved 2026-08-25. Congressional Budget Office — Options for Reducing the Deficit: 2025 to 2034, Table 1-1 (Projected Savings From Options for Reducing the Deficit) — source, 2024-12, retrieved 2026-08-25.