It’s fashionable to call the current federal government shutdown a “crisis,” to focus on the missed paychecks, delayed services and bureaucratic disarray. But what if this standoff –this uncomfortable pause in government business — is exactly what the country needs right now? What if the dysfunction is finally forcing Washington, and all of us, to look in the mirror?

For too long, both parties have governed as if the laws of arithmetic didn’t apply to them. Year after year, Congresses controlled by Republicans and Democrats alike have voted for budgets that plunge us deeper into debt –now a staggering $38 trillion and counting. Each year, we add another $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion in deficits. These aren’t emergency measures or wartime expenses. They’re routine shortfalls — ordinary overspending that any responsible household, business or local government would never tolerate.

If a private company managed its books the way Washington manages ours, it would have long ago gone bankrupt. In truth, the United States already has — just not officially. We’ve papered over insolvency with borrowed money, low interest rates and a political culture addicted to spending beyond its means. But reality always catches up, and ours is beginning to.

The cost of servicing the debt — just paying interest — is now consuming a historic share of federal spending. Hundreds of billions of dollars each year go not to defense or education or infrastructure but simply to keep up with our past excesses. That’s money that could fund programs we all agree are essential — such as SNAP benefits, which millions of low-income Americans rely on and which may soon run dry during this very shutdown.

We are literally borrowing money to pay interest on money we already borrowed. That is not sustainable. It is financial quicksand, and the longer we avoid confronting it, the deeper we sink.

That’s why, uncomfortable as it is, this fight is healthy. It’s the fever that signals the infection is finally being recognized. For years, Washington has operated on the illusion that fiscal restraint is optional — that we can endlessly defer the reckoning. But the shutdown is forcing clarity. It’s exposing the fault lines, the contradictions and, ultimately, the moral bankruptcy that underlies our fiscal one.

Yes, air traffic controllers deserve to be paid. Yes, federal workers in Maryland should not bear the brunt of political stalemate. But those hardships, as painful as they are, are minuscule compared to what’s coming if we continue down this road. When interest payments alone begin to crowd out defense, infrastructure, and basic safety-net spending — when creditors begin to question the value of the dollar — the pain will be far more widespread and far more permanent.

The real crisis isn’t the shutdown — it’s the decades of moral cowardice that made it inevitable. Both parties share the blame. Republicans have cut taxes without cutting spending. Democrats have expanded entitlements without paying for them. Each side has defended its own priorities, and neither has had the courage to say what must be said: We can’t have everything.