U.S. · U.S. Treasury · Fortune Technology
The actual goal, Clancy argued, doesn’t need to be a balanced budget—a political and mathematical near-impossibility
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Last year’s deficit-to-GDP was roughly 6%, growing about three times faster than the economy itself.
Key facts
- The Congressional Budget Office projects the federal deficit will reach $1.9 trillion in fiscal year 2026 and balloon to $3.1 trillion by 2036
- Nightmare on Main Street is betting a vivid-enough picture of what happens after $40 trillion, $45 trillion, and $50 trillion might change that calculus
- The report lands as the U.S. gross national debt recently crossed $39 trillion for the first time—a milestone reached less than five months after it hit $38 trillion
- Of the $7 trillion the U.S. spent last year, only 27% is discretionary
Summary
No Labels, the centrist political organization that has spent 16 years pushing bipartisan solutions in Washington, has quietly released Nightmare on Main Street —a fictional “oral history” narrated from the vantage point of 2029, in which a cascade of weak Treasury bond auctions triggers an economic collapse worse than the Great Depression. “There’s a sense that there are all of these threats gathering on the horizon,” Ryan Clancy, No Labels’ chief strategist, told Fortune. The report lands as the U.S. gross national debt recently crossed $39 trillion for the first time—a milestone reached less than five months after it hit $38 trillion. “Neither party has any credibility on the debt or deficit right now,” Clancy said. The fictional scenario in Nightmare on Main Street centers on a collapse that begins not with a government shutdown or debt ceiling standoff—the familiar Washington theatrics—but with something more technical and far more consequential: Treasury bond auctions that start failing.