The confession from the floor

Representative Eric Burlison of Missouri has said out loud what too few of his colleagues will admit: that most members of Congress, in both parties, are — his word, not mine — drunk on spending other people's money (Fox News). I find this candor bracing. A legislature that cannot exercise restraint does not merely produce deficits; it corrodes the one asset a republic cannot repurchase at any price — the confidence of those who lend it money.

I spent the better part of my public life arguing that public credit is not an abstraction. It is the difference between a government that can act in a crisis and one that must beg, wait, or capitulate. When lenders doubt you, the interest rate they charge is a tax on every future generation — levied without a vote, without debate, and without mercy. A Congress that treats the Treasury as a common pool to be drawn down at will is not governing; it is borrowing against its children's freedom of action.

Healthcare spending as a case study

Burlison points specifically to healthcare premiums as the mechanism by which reckless spending translates into household pain (Fox News). I will not pretend to have mastered the engineering of modern insurance markets — that would be false modesty in reverse, since I genuinely could not have known them. But the underlying dynamic is one I recognize absolutely: when government subsidy inflates the price of a necessary good, the benefit flows to the provider and the cost flows to the consumer. The discretionary income that might have circulated in trade, in savings, in productive investment, is instead consumed by the premium. That is a tax by another name, and it falls hardest on those least able to bear it.

The bipartisan character of the disease

What strikes me most in Burlison's charge is that he does not exempt his own party (Fox News). That is the mark of a serious diagnosis rather than a partisan complaint. I was a Federalist in an era when parties were young and their temptations were already visible. I knew then that the tendency to spend is not ideological; it is institutional. Every legislator who delivers a benefit to a constituent today can point to it; the bill arrives distributed across millions of future taxpayers who did not vote in that district. The incentive is perverse, it is durable, and it will not be cured by rhetoric alone.

What an energetic government actually requires

Let me be clear on something that gets lost in every conversation about fiscal discipline: I am not an apostle of feeble government. I never was. I argued for an energetic executive, a national bank, federal investment in manufactures and infrastructure — all of it. But vigorous government and profligate government are not the same animal. The former concentrates resources on objects of national consequence; the latter disperses them on objects of local convenience and re-election arithmetic. The first builds productive capacity. The second merely builds dependency.

A government that cannot control its own expenditure eventually cannot control its own interest rate — and once it loses that, it has surrendered a critical instrument of national economic management to the market. I would rather that instrument remain in republican hands.

The recommendation

Burlison is right to name the problem publicly, and the naming is a start. But naming is not a remedy. The remedy requires binding procedural constraints — rules that make the cost of spending visible at the moment of the vote, not five years later in a budget projection that no one reads. It requires a Treasury and an executive willing to say, in plain terms, what the accumulated debt costs per household per year. And it requires legislators in both parties who are willing to trade a local benefit today for national solvency tomorrow. That trade is hard. It is also, in the plainest sense, the job.