“First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do.” — Epictetus, Discourses, 3.23
Net interest on the federal debt is set to cross $1 trillion this fiscal year, more than the Pentagon’s entire budget, and it holds there every year through 2035 on the Congressional Budget Office’s own numbers (CBO, 2025). On the CBO’s calm, no-crisis baseline, debt held by the public breaks the record set finishing World War II by fiscal year 2030 (CBO, 2026). That’s about four years out. Treasury’s response this month was to double its debt buyback program, a move I wrote about this week in Treasury Buybacks: A Colossal Failure in the Making: a few billion dollars a month against a $32 trillion market, a rounding error dressed up as a fix.
Epictetus’s advice was never really about wanting the right things. It was about deciding, in a calm moment, what you would be, so the decision is already made by the time the hard moment arrives and willpower is in short supply. The Debt Brake: Discipline That Doesn’t Depend on Willpower describes the same idea built into a government. Switzerland’s constitutional “debt brake” has run since 2003, a cyclically adjusted spending ceiling that tightens in good years and loosens automatically in bad ones, with any shortfall required to be paid back within three years. Federal debt fell from 25.3 percent of GDP to 13.5 percent in the sixteen years that followed. Congress has a bill modeled on it, the Responsible Budget Targets Act, sitting unpassed since 2023.
What strikes me is that the Swiss rule doesn’t ask anyone to be braver or more disciplined than an American senator. It asks them to write the rule down before the vote that tests it, back when nobody’s career depends on breaking it yet. That’s the whole trick, and it’s a Stoic one whether or not the Swiss constitution meant it as one: you don’t get to choose your character in the emergency. You choose it in the years before, when it’s boring, when nobody’s watching, when it costs you nothing to write the rule the way you’ll wish you had once the bill comes due.
The Practice
Pick one place in your life where you keep waiting on willpower you don’t reliably have: the savings transfer you mean to make before you see the balance, the laptop you mean to close at a set hour, the drink you mean to have just one of. This week, build the Swiss version instead: a standing rule, set now, while it costs you nothing, so future you isn’t the one who has to be strong.
See you next Saturday. — Phil
Sourced from the Congressional Budget Office’s 2025 and 2026 budget and economic outlooks, and my own reporting this week in “Treasury Buybacks: A Colossal Failure in the Making” and “The Debt Brake: Discipline That Doesn’t Depend on Willpower.”
Editor’s Note: A word of thanks to the service members of the United States who remain deployed across the Middle East, far from home while the rest of us argue about budgets. Their service is a debt this country doesn’t repay with numbers on a ledger, and they deserve better than they get. Thank you.