Harger: Conservatives cheer when I call out state overspending. Will they keep that principle now that it’s Trump?

Washington doesn’t have a revenue problem. It has a spending problem. I’ve made many commentaries arguing this point. We keep adding programs. We take one-time money from the federal government, then make it into a permanent program that state taxpayers have to pick up.

We keep spending and growing more and more programs without a clear way to pay for them. We passed an income tax on millionaires, allegedly just on millionaires for now, and looking at this state’s revenue picture, I’ve got a hard time believing that threshold stays put.

I’ve been consistent about one principle the whole time: Washington needs to live within its means. That’s basic fiscal responsibility, and it isn’t a partisan idea. The government can’t be everything to everyone.

That’s why I shook my head after the president’s speech last night.

Different party. Same bad math.

The Trump dividend sounds great until you check the checkbook

President Trump stood up in Dallas and promised every American adult $5,000, the “Trump Dividend,” if Republicans hold the House and Senate after the midterms. Five grand in your pocket. Who says no to that?

Me.

I’m sorry to be a party-pooper: we don’t have it.

We don’t have $5,000 per adult to hand out. We don’t have $50. We aren’t negotiating from strength here. We are broke and doing that thing broke people do where they pick up the check for the whole table to prove they’re fine.

You know the friend I mean. The one who can’t get from the first of the month to the last without the wheels coming off. Bills stacking up. Debt climbing. And there they are in a brand new truck, tanned from a vacation that lives on a card somewhere, cheerfully making it all worse. You love the guy. You also want to grab him by the shoulders and yell, how are you not terrified?

That’s us. That’s the country right now. The truck is beautiful. The card is maxed. And somebody just proposed a round for the house.

We spend more on interest than we spend on defense

We are sitting on $40 trillion in national debt.

Forty trillion.

We now spend more servicing the debt than we spend on national defense. More on the interest bill than on the entire military. That’s the actual line item. And the president’s dividend would shovel roughly another trillion onto the pile.

If we owed nothing in interest, all that money stays home. Roads. Defense. Schools. Whatever you think actually matters, there’d be real money for it. Instead, it evaporates every single year, paying rent on decisions we already made, so that we can afford to make more of them.

This spending and debt is about your kids. Your grandkids. Their grandkids. We’re making decisions today that will financially strap people who haven’t been born yet, which is a remarkable trick: billing customers who don’t exist. And it may not politely wait for them, either. Other countries finance this debt. They buy our bonds. What happens the day they look at our books the way we look at that friend’s driveway, and quietly decide to stop lending?

I ask my own audience to be consistent about this

Moderate and conservative audience members agree wholeheartedly when I call out wasteful state spending. You’ve said it back to me in texts and web comments and emails: “Charlie, we can’t keep spending money we don’t have. Thank you for calling out state leaders on this.”

So where’s that principle this morning?

I talk with Andrew Villeneuve from the Northwest Progressive Institute occasionally on this show, and he gets exasperated with me. He tells me I’m wrong about the state, that we’re actually spending less as a share of our total revenue than we used to. I understand his argument. My answer never changes: whatever the ratio says, we’re spending more in total; you make choices, you stop trying to be everything to everyone. He sighs. We move on.

I’d love to hear my Republican friends explain why that same logic dissolves at the state line. How is it responsible for the federal government to promise $5,000 a head while we’re drowning? How is that different from the wasteful state spending you have rightly hammered for years? I’m just looking for consistency. Spending beyond our means doesn’t somehow become a good thing if it’s your team doing it.

Because the friend with the maxed-out cards has one option the federal government does not. He can declare bankruptcy. He can hit bottom, sell the truck, and start over. Countries don’t get a bottom. We just keep kicking the can and mailing the bill to people who never got a vote on it.

A dividend is money you earned. This is money we borrowed against our grandchildren, for what, exactly?

We will be long dead, and they will still be paying for this.

Living within our means has to mean something at every level, in every capital, no matter which party is in charge.

Charlie Harger is the host of “Seattle’s Morning News” on KIRO Newsradio. You can read more of his stories and commentaries here. Follow Charlie on X and email him here. 

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