Republicans can’t do it alone.

Ralph Bristol

by Ralph Bristol, Facebook Post, July 18, 2025- The successful attempt to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for two years should teach us a lesson that most of you don’t want to hear.  Republicans can’t do it alone.  They must include Democrats to find real spending cuts. 

Republicans would like to believe that their cuts to Medicaid and kicking NPR and PBS off the federal government teat shows they can make hard choices, but it shows the opposite.  It shows that just Republicans alone can barely make even the easy choices when it comes to spending cuts.  

The spending cuts to Medicaid are substantial, but still only a small fraction of what is needed to eliminate the debt threat. The hard choices are the ones that reduce the people’s reliance on the giant entitlement programs, Medicare and Social Security.  That is going to take a bipartisan deal. 

 

If President Trump is the dealmaker he thinks he is, he should be licking his chops over the chance to make a deal with Democrats that would cut spending enough to eliminate this one existential threat to our nation. He wouldn't just be a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize, but the Nobel Prize in Economics as well. 

He can’t run for re-election, so he has nothing to lose and everything to gain. It will not be popular.  It can’t be, or it won’t work.  That’s what makes it so hard.  We have allowed the spending to get so far out of control that reining it in is going to hurt, and if doesn’t hurt nearly everyone, it won’t eliminate the debt threat. 

That’s what makes it the biggest deal any president will ever make.  

I find it unlikely that this president has any interest in being that deal-maker.  No-one wants to be the one to make that deal, but it’s better that one does it willingly, rather than losing the game of musical chairs and having nowhere to run when the time runs out and circumstances force his hand.  I have discussed before what those circumstances will be: a failed bond sale that sends interest rates skyrocketing, a stock market crash, followed by massive unemployment and a recession that becomes a depression.  

Austerity is not fun, but it will be easier if it is planned, rather than imposed.  Those are our choices: planned or imposed austerity, for a period long enough to get our national debt down to around 50% of GDP.  Recovery will be gradual because federal spending is part of the economy, so when the spending cuts are imposed by the inability to borrow as much as necessary to keep up with the current level of spending, it will impact economic growth. The economy will grow slower, so it will take longer to grow ourselves out of the problem.

 

Never in our history has the United States needed the services of the nation’s best deal maker more than now.  If President Trump is the unsurpassed deal-maker he is advertised to be, and he doesn’t make this deal, he is not only missing the opportunity of a lifetime, and a potential Nobel Prize in Economics, he is denying his nation the life-saving care that only he has to offer.

Ralph Bristol is the former long-time morning talk radio host broadcasting on Supertalk 99.7 WTN. He was one of the less provocative and bombastic of conservative radio personalities, more thoughtful and grounded in conservative ideas. He left talk radio in 2018 and retired. He lives in Nashville. 

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