August 22, 2026 - U.S. Trade War Is Back on With Canada

Yesterday I asked you a poll question I lifted, almost verbatim, from a presidential commission.

In 2010, Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles put a plan before eighteen commissioners that raised revenue, raised the retirement age, trimmed the cost-of-living adjustment, and capped the deductions we love — mortgage interest, charitable giving, the break on employer health insurance. Everything hurt a little. That was the design. They needed fourteen votes to send it to Congress. They got eleven.

So I put the same bargain to you: would you accept both higher taxes on yourself and reduced Social Security and Medicare benefits in order to reduce the $40 trillion national debt?

As I write this, 31,018 of you have voted. Seventy-eight percent said no.

I'm astonished, and I probably shouldn't be. The Peterson Foundation polls this every year and finds 82 percent of voters saying Congress should make the debt a priority — 89 percent of Republicans, 75 percent of Democrats. That consensus evaporates the moment it costs anything.

My friend Lanny Davis, who served in the Clinton White House, emailed me yesterday and reminded me of Senator Russell Long: "Don't tax you, don't tax me, tax that fellow behind the tree." Long ran the Senate Finance Committee for fifteen years. He knew precisely who he was describing.

Here is what I keep turning over:

We spend our time asking why Washington won't touch this. Maybe that's the wrong question. More than 24,000 of you just declined the only arithmetic that works.

Congress isn't defying us on the debt.

Congress is us. 

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