Regressive revenue, not continuing resolutions, is bankrupting America. In “Washington Bought Itself Another 100 Days. It Didn’t Buy a Fiscal Plan”, Jay Rogers of National Review argues that the September 2 continuing resolution was another congressional punt: the House passed it 370 to 48, the Senate 90 to 6, the deficit reached roughly $2 trillion in the first eleven months of fiscal year 2026, and gross debt approached $40 trillion. He is right that the trajectory is unsustainable. He is wrong about the disease. The CR is a calendar patch. It is not the thing eating the budget.
Rogers lists the line items himself and gives the game away. The Congressional Budget Office’s August Monthly Budget Review shows spending growth concentrated in Social Security, up $78 billion; Medicare, up $73 billion; Medicaid, up $47 billion; and net interest, up $111 billion. That is $309 billion in growth across mandatory programs and debt service. The September CR does not control any of those numbers. It cannot raise a Social Security check. It cannot change a Medicare reimbursement formula. It cannot alter Medicaid eligibility rules.
Rogers is furious at a piece of legislation that, by design, has zero authority over the spending he worries about. That is like blaming the thermostat for the heating bill.
Pass all twelve appropriations bills on December 11. Fund defense, education, and the federal alphabet soup with clean, permanent legislation. Add no riders. The deficit Rogers describes continues almost unchanged. A household can pass a perfect monthly budget while refinancing its credit card every quarter to cover last quarter’s bills. The mandatory-spending growth is the balance. Interest is the new minimum payment. The CR is the refinancing paperwork.
He is furious about the paperwork. He should be asking why the balance keeps growing.
The interest line is doing the worst work. Interest payments rose 12 percent from a year earlier, faster than Social Security, Medicare, or almost anything else in the budget. Net interest is now larger than national defense. That crossover is not a December 11 problem. It is a compounding problem.
The three credit downgrades make the same point from the rating agencies’ side. S&P stripped the United States of its top-tier rating in 2011. Fitch followed in 2023. Moody’s did it in 2025. Rogers reads those downgrades as verdicts on congressional cowardice. They are also verdicts on a revenue system that cannot keep pace with the obligations the country has already chosen.
And here is where the usual fiscal sermon quietly cheats. Rogers concedes that Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and interest are driving the increase, then treats the growth of those obligations as if it were a natural disaster. It is not. An aging population costs money. Healthcare costs money. Long-term care costs money. The question is who pays, and whether we want to abandon the programs that keep old age, illness, and disability from becoming private catastrophes.
Social Security is not an indulgence. Medicare is not a moral failure. Medicaid is not a leak in the national character. They are the public floor under a country where most people cannot insure themselves against a thirty-year retirement, a chronic illness, or the cost of caring for a parent. Rogers wants the reader to see the floor as the problem because he does not want to discuss who has been allowed to climb above it without paying much for the stairs.
The Fiscal Responsibility Act proves the point. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated that it would save roughly $1 trillion over a decade. That is real money. It also touched only discretionary spending, the smaller slice of the federal pie. The caps expired before fiscal year 2026 began. Congress replaced them with points of order, which are the legislative equivalent of a New Year’s resolution: stated with feeling, abandoned by February.
Even if those caps had stayed in force, they could not have slowed a Social Security growth line driven by demographics or a Medicare line driven by medical prices. A cap on appropriations does not reform a hospital bill. It does not make a nursing home cheaper. It does not collect a dollar from a billionaire whose income arrives as appreciating assets rather than wages.
The CR does contain a fair target. It delayed a rule allowing political appointees to pull grants for political reasons, extended trade preferences for sub-Saharan Africa and Haiti, and kept several expiring authorities alive. When lawmakers do not have to choose, they make several small choices and call it bipartisanship. That is a fair tell. But it is a tell about process, not the source of the debt.
To be fair to Rogers, his strongest point is the one he buries. Punting a shutdown fight seven weeks before the midterms is a defensible political call. Furloughed federal workers, delayed veterans’ benefits, and TSA lines stretching out the airport door do not help anybody vote his way. He is right that a shutdown is not a fiscal strategy. He is wrong that the absence of a shutdown is one.
So what do we build instead?
Start with the revenue that Rogers keeps treating as weather. Lift the payroll-tax cap so high earners contribute on the same broad wage base that funds everyone else’s retirement. Tax large financial transactions and substantial wealth. Tax unearned income more seriously than a paycheck. Those are not attacks on Social Security. They are how a society pays for the promise it made.
Then let Medicare negotiate drug prices aggressively, instead of treating pharmaceutical pricing as a sacred text. Build a public pharmaceutical manufacturer for essential drugs where private suppliers use scarcity to charge whatever the sick can bear. The United States already knows how to fund research, produce medicines, and guarantee markets. The missing piece is public bargaining power. A public manufacturer would not abolish the market. It would stop making the public buy the same medicine from a monopoly at a ransom price.
Long-term care needs the same imagination. The country should invest in a public and cooperative care system, with stable funding, well-paid workers, and local member-governed providers rather than forcing families to liquidate their homes for nursing care. A cooperative long-term-care network could keep workers, residents, and families at the table. Public financing would cover the risk that private premiums cannot. The point is not to make care free. The point is to stop treating old age as a family’s private bankruptcy event.
Protect Social Security. Expand the floor. Make Medicare cheaper by bargaining against the firms that have been charging us. Build care as a public and cooperative service instead of a debt machine. Pay for it by taxing concentrated wealth and unearned gains, not by cutting the benefits ordinary people were promised.
The CR is the symptom. But the deeper disease is a country that socializes its obligations while privatizing the revenue needed to meet them. The alternative is not another hundred days of paperwork. It is a welfare state strong enough to keep its promises—and a tax system strong enough to make the people who gained the most from the country help pay for it.