Fiscal Responsibility, Now with Extra Arson

The $15 billion-a-week shutdown, the Supreme Court’s tariff circus, and why The Big Short’s Michael Burry smells smoke again.

Good morning, America! Our government is closed, the Supreme Court is open for business, and Wall Street is clutching its pearls while Michael Burry quietly sharpens his knives.

The country’s 36-day shutdown has officially gone from “political stunt” to “macroeconomic act of self-harm.” GDP is bleeding, 1.4 million federal employees are working for the joy of service alone, and 42 million Americans are learning that “SNAP benefits paused” is bureaucratese for “you’re on your own.” Congress, meanwhile, is conducting a master class in governing by tantrum, with MAGA Mike Johnson leading the performance-art piece “Fiscal Hostage-Taking for Fun and Profit.”

The federal government remains shut down for a record-shattering 36 days, and it’s costing roughly $15 billion a week, that’s about $2 billion every workday, or one small fortune per congressional press conference.
Goldman Sachs now calls it the most damaging shutdown in U.S. history.

The irony, of course, is that the same people who scream about “fiscal responsibility” are torching billions of taxpayer dollars because someone in the House Freedom Caucus saw a QAnon meme about the Epstein files and thought, “Yes, that seems like sound fiscal policy.”

The economy is wheezing, millions aren’t getting food assistance, and 1.4 million federal workers are performing their jobs for the moral satisfaction of knowing their direct deposit will one day, probably, return.
Markets hate uncertainty, but Washington appears addicted to it, governing as hostage negotiation, with the hostages being… everyone.

Yet, in the middle of all that chaos, voters staged a small democratic intervention.
The 2025 off-year elections were less a referendum on local potholes and more a primal scream against Donald Trump’s economic cosplay.

In Virginia, Abigail Spanberger didn’t just win, she detonated the Trump model, taking the governor’s mansion by fifteen points and bringing with her a Democratic sweep of every statewide office.
In New Jersey, Mikie Sherrill turned a “toss-up” into a thirteen-point rout.

Even California joined the chorus, passing Proposition 50, a redistricting measure designed to checkmate Trump’s Texas gerrymander.

Polls showed voters cared about affordability, wages, housing, and healthcare, the boring, grown-up stuff, and had no patience left for tariffs, shutdowns, and MAGA psychodrama.
It was, in every measurable way, a repudiation of Trump’s governance style: authoritarian spectacle with a side of economic vandalism.

As one exhausted strategist put it, “Americans are tired of being props in someone else’s reality show.”
Translation: the pendulum just smacked back.

On First Street NE, the Supreme Court is about to hear the Trump Tariff Showdown, otherwise known as “Can the President Just Make Up Trade Law Because He Feels Like It?”

Oral arguments begin at 10 a.m. sharp, and the stakes are simple: if Trump wins, he essentially gets to treat the global economy like his personal Monopoly board. If he loses, he owes American businesses roughly half a trillion dollars in refund checks, money that, inconveniently, was never his to collect in the first place.

Michael Popok, bless his caffeinated legal soul, previewed it with his trademark flourish: “Read the statute, read the statute, read the statute.” Which is lawyer-speak for “it doesn’t say what Trump wishes it said.” The IEEPA law doesn’t mention tariffs at all, because Congress, remember them?, reserved that power for itself back when powdered wigs were in fashion.

So, today the justices will perform their usual interpretive dance: Barrett will cite herself, Kagan will sigh audibly, and Alito will likely wonder aloud whether the word tariff might have been hiding under an invisible ink clause that only appears to presidents named Donald.

The conservative majority is now caught in its own intellectual bear trap. The “major questions doctrine” they used to kill Biden’s student loan forgiveness now threatens to nuke Trump’s entire tariff regime. If they apply their own standard consistently, the tariffs are toast. If they don’t, well, the Court officially becomes a subsidiary of the Trump Organization.

Stay tuned. It’ll be like Hamilton, but with more constitutional collapse and fewer catchy songs.

Michael Burry, yes, that The Big Short guy who spotted the 2008 housing collapse while everyone else was busy ordering custom yacht interiors, has once again declared the party over. He’s shorting the AI boom like it’s WeWork with GPUs.

Palantir’s CEO Alex Karp, ever the philosopher-king of overreaction, responded not with stoic indifference but with a public tantrum so fragile you could serve it on fine china. Accusing Burry of “not understanding AI” while his own stock trades at absurdly metaphysical valuations is the market equivalent of yelling “How dare you!” while standing on a soapbox made of Tesla stock and hopium.

When CEOs start lashing out at short sellers, it’s not a show of strength, it’s a cry for help. Karp’s defensive whimper confirms what we’ve suspected: the AI hype bubble is as delicate as a startup founder’s ego after a down round.

And while investors are too busy whispering “but ChatGPT can do math now!” to notice, Burry’s already moved to the lifeboats. The rest of the market is still dancing on deck to the tune of “Generative Titanic.”

In a universe governed by Newtonian politics, every action meets an equal and opposite reaction. Democracy flexed last night, Spanberger in Virginia, Sherrill in New Jersey, Mamdani in New York, and the authoritarians felt the recoil.

But as Heather Cox Richardson reminded us, reactionary forces don’t disappear; they just change shape. Trump is already laying the rhetorical groundwork to delegitimize California’s Prop 50 win, calling it “rigged” before the votes were even counted. It’s the new playbook: preemptive victimhood as a governing strategy.

The far right is eating itself alive, with Tucker Carlson now playing footsie with actual neo-Nazis while Mitch McConnell, from his fainting couch, whispers, “We can’t go full Hitler.” You think?

The movement that branded itself as “anti-woke” is now fully “anti-wake”, drifting further into the dark waters of grievance, conspiracy, and aesthetic fascism. But there’s a lesson in Richardson’s calm refrain: watch who’s panicking, not who’s posturing. Trump’s posts read less like rage and more like fear.

Markets are jittery, Washington is paralyzed, the Court is convening, and the entire country feels like it’s holding its breath through gritted teeth. The pendulum hasn’t just swung, it’s vibrating violently, and you can hear the screws loosening.

Somewhere in Mar-a-Lago, Trump is almost certainly posting “And so it begins” again, while Burry quietly updates his spreadsheets, and Heather Cox Richardson exhales into the collective anxiety like a constitutional therapist.

We are, all of us, living through the physics of politics, momentum, friction, and the slow grind of a system trying to remember how to self-correct.

Against all odds, democracy woke up this morning still breathing. Bruised, broke, badly caffeinated, but breathing.