It’s tax week in the US, and Kevin McCarthy is apparently poised to detail House Republicans’ demands for a deal to avert a catastrophic US debt default.

That should make for a fun juxtaposition. Tax receipts will refine expectations for the so-called “X-date,” the threshold beyond which Janet Yellen would have to conjure other, even more “extraordinary” means by which to forestall the paroxysm that’d accompany a voluntary abrogation of the nation’s financial obligations.

Apparently, McCarthy wants a vote to suspend the debt ceiling until May of 2024, buying US lawmakers an entire year to work towards another intractable stalemate. In exchange for kicking the can directly into the 2024 election cycle, McCarthy wants limits on non-defense discretionary spending, work requirements for some Medicaid recipients under 60, a scheme to reclaim unused COVID relief funding and sunset provisions on selected regulations, along with easier energy permitting.

“They’re aiming to limit budget growth to 1% annually for the next 10 years,” Punchbowl, which originally detailed the (somewhat amorphous, and mostly unserious) proposal, explained. House GOPers would also like to repeal “some” green tax credits and pursue a legislative ban on student loan forgiveness. I don’t know when this is going to occur to Republicans, but doubling down on what sometimes seem like mean-spirited proposals (e.g., proactively making student debt relief illegal, as opposed to retroactively challenging attempts to cancel the debt through the courts) and power grabs inspired by religious extremism (e.g., claiming for the courts the authority to repeal FDA decisions in the pursuit of aggressively rolling back reproductive rights) is going to alienate a majority of young voters. There’s only so much gerrymandering can do to offset that.

When it comes to the debt ceiling (and everything else, really) McCarthy is in an unpalatable position. He has to placate tormenters from his own party at the expense of more moderate Republicans who’ll effectively be asked to vote on a bill which i) they don’t wholeheartedly support and ii) serves no purpose other than to get the ball rolling on negotiations with the Biden White House.

Biden, who was a Senator a decade before Matt Gaetz was born, understands McCarthy’s predicament, and notwithstanding this president’s (misplaced) faith in the promise of bipartisanship and good faith negotiating, isn’t going to let a weak House speaker off the hook.

As Matthew Yglesias wrote for Bloomberg Sunday, the debt ceiling has been “stuck in a bizarre quantum superposition” since the midterms. McCarthy says there won’t be an increase “unless the White House acquiesces to his demands [and] The White House responds that first McCarthy needs to make some demands.”

The Yglesias piece is worth the five minutes it’d take you to read it. He details what the implications of an implied 24% cut to non-military discretionary programs would actually mean (nothing good). But the basic, underlying problem is always the same. Cutting Social Security and Medicare is a non-starter. Military cuts could prove unpopular with many Republicans (both lawmakers and voters). And the GOP won’t raise taxes. That makes the “fiscal responsibility” math challenging, if not altogether impossible. I’ve been over this before, most recently here.

Out of options (or at least lacking good ones), McCarthy is apparently going to do what every Republican does when they’re out of ideas: Appeal to the ghost of Ronald Reagan for help. Specifically, McCarthy will speak at the NYSE on Monday, “in part because it was where Reagan gave a landmark economic speech in 1985,” Punchbowl said.

He (McCarthy, not Reagan) thinks Wall Street isn’t convinced that some GOPers are indeed willing to risk a default to prove a point about the purported sanctity of fiscal rectitude. The irony would be tragic if it weren’t so predictable. Fiscal rectitude in the US went out the window with Reagan. Supply-side economics is where fiscal sincerity goes to die.