Seventeen years ago, the Center for Freedom and Prosperity released a video explaining that America’s fiscal problem is excessive spending rather than red ink.

Here’s the 2026 version of that presentation.

To emphasize this message, I want to share three slides that I used in my speech.

First, here are two charts from the Congressional Budget Office. Both are bad news, but it’s important to understand that the chart on the left is driving the chart on the right.

If you want to understand why the chart on the left is the problem, here’s another visual from my speech.

The simple message is that government spending detracts from growth, regardless of how the budget is financed.

Last but not least, the debate over debt-financed spending is very strange because I have a middle-of-the-road perspective.

Unlike the folks who believe in Keynesian economics, I don’t think deficits should be celebrated. Yet I also disagree with the deficits-are-the-worst-thing-in-the-world crowd because they don’t focus on the real problem.

To elaborate, the people who fixate on deficits and debt are right that the United States (and many other nations) are stumbling toward a fiscal crisis.

Unfortunately, these are also the people who are very susceptible to supporting tax increases. That’s a very naive view. The real-world evidence shows that higher tax burdens almost certainly would make a bad fiscal situation even worse.

At the risk of understatement, the main fiscal problem in the United States is not inadequate tax revenue.

P.S. Since the focus should be on government spending, one implication is that a spending cap is the ideal policy instead of a requirement to balance budgets.