What the sweep promised

A broad Democrats election sweep brought a bumper new crop of Democrats to power in the week before November 11, 2026. The incoming officeholders are calling for support for programs for children and their parents and emphatically endorse Medicare for All. On the safety net, they want to roll back Donald Trump's cuts to Medicaid and food stamps and restore subsidies for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act.

The fiscal starting point

What those commitments meet is a strained federal balance sheet:

• •The federal debt has hit $40tn, more than 120% of the nation's gross domestic product.
• •The deficit is running at about 6.2% of GDP; in October alone, the first month of the 2027 fiscal year, it ballooned to $409bn.
• •Paying interest on the debt costs some 3.2% of GDP, about $1tn, more than is spent on national defense.
• •The Congressional Budget Office projects that debt and interest payments will continue to grow faster than the economy over coming decades.

Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act will add somewhere between $4.1tn and $5.5tn to the federal debt over 10 years, depending on whether temporary tax cuts become permanent.

Priced: what restoring the cuts would cost

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has put figures on the reversal agenda. Restoring the subsidies to health insurance plans under Obamacare from 2030 to 2039 would cost $460bn. Undoing the budget cuts to the Snap food stamp program and Medicaid would cost $2.2tn over that decade.

Why past Democratic governments did not raise taxes

Bruce Bartlett, the historian who advised Ronald Reagan on budget policy, argues the present state of affairs is the outcome of a Republican strategy of cutting taxes to strangle the budget and constrain future Democratic administrations. The tax cuts were designed to "make sure the next Democratic president is a complete and total failure", Bartlett said.

The record of tax increases under recent governments:

• •The last time a government with any Republican in power delivered a tax increase was in the 1990s, when George HW Bush was president with a Democratic Congress; Bush lost reelection to Bill Clinton.
• •Bill Clinton's 1993 tax increases are estimated to yield the equivalent of $3.3tn over the 2030-2039 decade in inflation-adjusted terms, helping produce the first budget surplus since the 1960s - a feat later spent on a tax cut by Clinton's successor, George W. Bush.
• •Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act raised the equivalent of $1.1tn over 2030-2039, in inflation-adjusted dollars, though Obama also made permanent some Bush tax cuts.
• •Joe Biden's original Build Back Better Act, passed in the House, would have raised the equivalent of $2.3tn over the decade; the Senate authorized only about $700bn in the Inflation Reduction Act.

One constraint on any tax-raising agenda is the comparative starting point: total tax revenue in the US amounts to less than 26% of GDP, 9 percentage points less than Britain's, 9.5 less than Canada's, 12.5 less than Germany's and 16 less than Sweden's.

Meanwhile, some tax cuts in Trump's OBBBA are set to expire in the next couple of years - exemptions on tips and overtime income, a new seniors deduction and a higher state and local tax deduction. Extending them would cost about $1.2tn over the 10-year window, and the CBPP observed that these cuts offer next to nothing to Americans on the bottom rungs of the income distribution.

What comes next

The Congressional Budget Office projects debt and interest payments will keep growing faster than the economy, and the trust fund that pays for social security benefits is scheduled to run out of money in less than six years, which by law would trigger an automatic 22% cut in benefits.