By Malcolm Lee Kitchen III | MK3 Law Group
(c) 2026 – All rights reserved.

“I can scarcely contemplate a greater calamity that could befall this country, than to be loaded with a debt exceeding their ability ever to discharge.”

Brutus wrote that before the Constitution was ratified. He was warning us then. We didn’t listen. Here we are.

The national debt is not a policy footnote. It is not a talking point for campaign season. It is the defining structural crisis of the American republic, and the people who hold power in Washington treat it like a weather pattern, something to acknowledge briefly and then ignore because there is nothing to be done about weather.

There is something to be done. There always was. The decision was made not to do it.

That decision has consequences. Real ones. The kind that do not stay inside spreadsheets.

What the Numbers Actually Say

Year after year, the debt grows. Not incrementally. Not modestly. It accelerates. In 1995, the national debt sat at just under $5 trillion. By 2010, it had climbed to $5 trillion. By 2010, it had climbed to $13.6 trillion. Ten years after that, it stood at $26.9 trillion.As of now, it has blown past $26.9 trillion. As of now, it has blown past $34 trillion and is still climbing with no credible mechanism in place to stop it.

Do the arithmetic. The debt more than doubled between 1995 and 2010. It more than doubled again in the decade that followed. The trajectory is not leveling. It is steepening.

Not one president in that entire stretch left office with a smaller debt than when he arrived. Not one. Republican, Democrat, wartime, peacetime, boom cycle or recession, the number always went up. The names on the door of the Oval Office changed. The direction of the debt did not.

Meanwhile, interest payments on that debt have become the second-largest expenditure in the federal budget, sitting just behind Social Security. The government now spends more on the cost of borrowing money than it spends on national defense. Think about what that means operationally. A country that borrows at this scale is not building strength. It is servicing a hole.

And the hole keeps getting deeper.

This Is Not a Revenue Problem

Some people will tell you the fix is simple: tax more. Government isn’t taking enough from the productive economy, they argue, and if we just raised the rates or closed the loopholes or made the wealthy pay their fair share, the math would work.

They are wrong.

Federal revenues have grown at a consistent pace for decades. Tax receipts have not collapsed. The government’s income has increased. The problem is not on the intake side of the ledger. What has outpaced revenue, every single year, is spending. The federal government does not have a funding shortage. It has a spending disorder, and no level of taxation has ever been able to keep up with it because the appetite for spending is structurally unlimited while revenue has a practical ceiling.

You cannot tax your way out of a spending problem. The math doesn’t work that way. Every time revenue increases, spending absorbs the increase and then exceeds it. That pattern has repeated across administrations, across economic cycles, across every kind of political configuration Washington has produced. The variable that never changes is the growth of the spending itself.

This is a government problem. Not a revenue problem. Not a management problem. A government problem at the structural level, one that reflects a federal apparatus that has expanded far beyond any boundary the Constitution ever contemplated or authorized.

What the Founders Actually Said

This is not a new diagnosis. The Founders understood it. They wrote about it plainly, without the fog of modern political language, and what they said was not optimistic.

George Washington was direct. He called public credit “a very important source of strength and security” and argued the country had a responsibility to preserve it. His method for doing that was equally direct: “use it as sparingly as possible.” The strategy in place today is the exact inversion of that advice. Borrow as much as possible. Spend without ceiling. Treat credit not as a resource to be guarded but as a mechanism to be maximized.

James Madison called public debt a public curse. He did not qualify that. He did not call it a necessary inconvenience or a manageable tool. He called it a curse. The word choice matters. A curse is not a problem to be optimized around. It is something to be rid of.

John Taylor of Caroline was even more specific about what debt does to national power. He argued it was obvious, his word, that a government sustained by debt possesses neither strength nor credit. It suffers “a diminution of both.” A large government funded by borrowed money does not project power. It borrows the appearance of power while the underlying structure weakens beneath it.

Thomas Jefferson went further than any of them. He argued there does not exist an engine “so corruptive of the government and so demoralizing of the nation as a public debt.” Corruptive of government. Demoralizing of the nation. These are not rhetorical gestures. These are structural predictions about what debt does to institutions and to the people living inside them over time.

And then he made the operational point that should end every debate about whether this is truly a national security issue. He warned that a country buried in debt would face “more ruin at home than all the enemies from abroad against whom this army and navy are to protect us.”

Read that sentence again. Jefferson believed unchecked debt was more dangerous to the republic than foreign adversaries. He made that argument before the United States had a permanent military establishment, before global nuclear arsenals existed, before the full range of modern threats had taken shape. He was looking at the structural logic of debt and government, and the conclusion he reached was that the internal rot caused by debt would outpace any external threat the nation faced.

He was right. Not because the external threats aren’t real. They are. But because a country that cannot fund its own obligations without continuous borrowing is a country whose strategic position is determined in significant part by its creditors, not its citizens.

The National Security Dimension

This is where the conversation becomes concrete and immediate, not theoretical.

Debt-dependent governments are vulnerable governments. When a significant portion of the national debt is held by foreign governments, including adversarial ones, the leverage equation shifts. Creditors have interests. Those interests do not always align with American interests. A government that must continuously access credit markets to function is a government that cannot afford to ignore the preferences of the people and institutions providing that credit.

This is not a hypothetical concern. It is a structural condition. The United States borrows heavily from foreign holders. Policy decisions, including defense posture, trade relationships, and diplomatic positioning, do not exist in a vacuum separate from fiscal reality. Leverage exists whether it is exercised openly or simply held in reserve.

Beyond the geopolitical dimension, there is the question of operational capacity. An enormous and growing share of federal spending goes directly to debt service, to paying the cost of past borrowing rather than funding present capability. Every dollar spent on interest is a dollar not available for defense infrastructure, for readiness, for the research and development that maintains technological advantage, for the things that actually constitute national security in material terms.

The debt does not sit alongside the national security budget. It competes with it. As interest payments grow, they crowd out productive spending. The military budget is a political and cultural priority, but it exists within a fiscal reality that is increasingly constrained by the accumulated cost of everything the federal government borrowed to spend on everything else. You cannot separate those things. They are the same ledger.

The Acceleration Nobody Is Talking About

The deficit conversation in Washington is almost always framed as a long-term concern. Something for the next generation. A problem that will matter eventually. Time to act later.

That framing is deliberate and it is dishonest.

The accumulation of debt is not a slow background process that will become urgent sometime in the future. It is accelerating now. The rate of new debt being added to the total is increasing. Interest rates, after years of artificial suppression, have risen, which means the cost of carrying the existing debt has risen with them. The government is not in a position where it can slow-walk a gradual adjustment. It is in a position where the structural pressure is building while the political will to address it remains effectively nonexistent.

No serious budget proposal with real teeth has passed through Congress in decades. The mechanisms that were supposed to enforce fiscal discipline, budget caps, sequestration triggers, deficit targets, have been suspended, waived, or simply ignored every time they created real pressure to reduce spending. The enforcement architecture does not work because the people responsible for enforcing it are the same people who benefit politically from spending without constraint.

This is not a system that self-corrects. It is a system that self-reinforces. Every year the debt grows, the interest cost grows, the structural pressure on the budget increases, and the political difficulty of making real cuts increases alongside it. The window for manageable correction narrows. The eventual reckoning becomes less manageable. The cycle continues.

Where This Ends

A constitutionally limited government does not need trillions in debt. Not even close. The federal government was not designed to operate at this scale, to absorb this much of the economy, or to require this level of continuous borrowing to function. The debt is not a symptom of external pressures or bad luck. It is the direct result of a government that has expanded far past its constitutional boundaries, accumulated obligations it cannot meet through legitimate revenue, and borrowed the difference with no credible plan to stop.

The Founders warned us. The math confirms it. The security implications are real.

Here at MK3 Law Group/MK3 Blog, opposing the size of the federal apparatus is not a policy preference. It is a constitutional imperative. The debt is the evidence. The argument made itself.

The question is whether enough people are paying attention before the ledger comes due.

© 2026 – MK3 Law Group

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