Raise the debt ceiling by $24 trillion — or kill the bill
Wendy Edelberg, a former chief economist at the Congressional Budget Office, is a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution.
Should Congress enact the budget reconciliation bill recently passed by the House (formally titled the One Big Beautiful Bill Act), the tax and spending policies set in motion over the next decade would require roughly $24 trillion in cumulative borrowing, pushing debt as a share of gross domestic product to about 124 percent. Yet Congress appears on track to raise the debt ceiling by only $4 trillion or perhaps $5 trillion or, if Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) has his way, $500 billion. What this means is that the Republican-controlled Congress is deliberately choosing a future for the country in which tax revenue falls well short of federal spending year after year — but in which the treasury is prohibited from making up the difference by borrowing.
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