By Robert Dean
Guest Columnist
America, we did it. We hit a new milestone. We really outdid ourselves. On August 19, the U.S. Treasury confirmed it: we’re now $40 trillion in debt — $40.05 trillion and counting, just five months after we cracked $39 trillion.
July’s deficit alone came in at $432 billion, a record for the month and the biggest monthly deficit since March 2021. Some of that spike was a calendar quirk that pushed August benefit payments into July, but even adjusted for that, the deficit was $333 billion — up 18% from a year earlier.
Thanks to a rancid economy, an honest-to-god war in Iran — U.S. strikes began February 28, and the conflict has now left 18 American service members dead and 757 wounded — plus billions a year in military aid to Israel and whatever remains of our commitment to Ukraine after Trump briefly froze military assistance last March before restoring it days later, we’re turning out our national pockets with moths flying out.
But wait, we’re bleeding money on the other end too: the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s emergency tariffs in February, putting more than $175 b-b-billion in tariff revenue into the refund process — money Trump’s own Treasury Secretary has acknowledged the government has to accommodate.
Slather on the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” and it gets worse. The Congressional Budget Office originally estimated the law would add $3.4 trillion to primary deficits over a decade. Once you include higher interest costs and the economic effects of the law, CBO’s newer estimate puts the total increase in deficits at about $4.2 trillion through 2034. Its Medicaid provisions alone are expected to leave 7.5 million more Americans without health insurance by 2034. You start to see where the leaks are.
The midterms are looming and Republicans will say, as they always do, that they want to lower the country’s debt. Well, comrades, guess who’s controlled the House, the Senate and the White House for nearly two years now? Who’s also handed out a tax-and-spending package whose benefits tilt wildly upward? According to CBO, the highest-income tenth of households capture nearly 64% of the net increase in household resources from the law, while the bottom fifth lose resources.
Sounds like a bad deal to me, but hey, I’m just a broke guy mad about broke guy things. I busted my headphones today. Ones that cancel out the noise while I write. Guess what? I can’t afford to buy a new pair right now, even though they help me do my job in public places.
Last week, I spoke at a convention with Mel Gibson and Kurt Russell and the Hobbits. I’m also thinking of working part-time at Home Depot to pay for my fiancé’s engagement ring.
The United States has had to wheel and deal an increasing amount of debt to cover the costs of health programs, stimulus benefits, disaster relief and daily government operations. On that last point, FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund received $22.51 billion in regular funding for fiscal 2025 and still needed a $29 billion supplemental appropriation, with $28 billion specifically earmarked for major disasters.
But they say climate change isn’t real, even though Exxon’s own scientists were warning the company about the dangers of climate change decades ago, while ExxonMobil later funded organizations and researchers that helped sow doubt about the scientific consensus. All so we could keep chanting, “drill, baby, drill.”
The problem is, we’re not collecting the taxes to pay for any of it. I can remember a time in 2016 when candidate Trump told the Washington Post he’d get rid of the $19 trillion debt “fairly quickly… over a period of eight years.”
Since then, it hasn’t shrunk.
It’s doubled.
DOGE, for its part, promised massive cuts to federal spending. Its own official number eventually topped out at about $215 billion in claimed savings — and even that figure came under fire from the Government Accountability Office this month. GAO examined roughly $110 billion of DOGE’s claimed contract, grant and lease savings and found contracts listed as terminated that weren’t, leases DOGE took credit for canceling even though their termination was already underway, and billions in claimed savings that couldn’t be verified.
And those taxes shouldn’t be on working people. They should be on the ultra-wealthy — the people with armies of accountants, offshore structures, trusts and every legal mechanism available to turn enormous fortunes into the smallest possible tax bill. Close the loopholes. Tax capital like we tax labor. Make people who have benefited the most from this country help pay to keep it running.
The same goes for megachurches.
We deserve better. We’re getting shafted, and the cliff is getting a lot closer than we want to admit.
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