If a ‘big, beautiful bill’ isn’t balanced, it’s just a big bill for all to pay

This all made me curious what U.S. government spending was in 1990. It was $1.8 trillion (in 1989, the year prior, spending was in the billions, with a “b”).

Lest I wax nostalgic, I checked with the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index data to understand, ballpark, what $1.8 trillion translates into dollars today: $4.32 trillion.

To give perspective, last year’s spending was $6.75 trillion — or roughly 44% higher than the dollar-for-dollar budget equivalent of 1990’s U.S. government spending while the U.S. population has grown about 31% since that time.

Any way you slice it, government spending has far outpaced growth.

Balancing the budget is hard, boring and important work

And what has happened to the U.S. debt in that time frame? What our government spends is one side of the equation, but what debt we take on to finance that spending is perhaps a more important measure.

Anybody who has tried to balance their budget understands this. In 1990, U.S. debt was roughly $3.3 trillion. Today it is at $36.2 trillion, ballooning to more than 10 times within that time frame.

Early in my career, I had the great privilege of seeing how government budgets are formed while serving as the policy director for then-Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue. I have spent countless hours of my life in the Governor’s Office of Planning and Budget, alongside Perdue and other staff and agency heads, watching leaders ask the hard questions.

New spending requests, existing expenditures, bond requests: It was all on the table.

I wish every Georgian had the chance to sit in these hearings. I think you would expect a lot more of your federal government.

And, honestly, you’d probably be pretty bored. So much of the focus on both smart spending and cost-cutting are on efforts that would not make a compelling headline, much less a punchy social media post.

In the era of all-caps, exclamation-point policy, the hard work of balancing a budget would lull most Americans into a stupor.

But budgeting is not entertainment. Balanced budgeting even less so. I think the federal government and its leaders can learn a lot from the process that states like Georgia go through to balance their budget.

While the details might vary, almost every U.S. state has a balanced budget requirement. In Georgia this means, in broad terms, that the money that comes in through tax revenue and fees has to pay for what the state proposes in spending.

This means that when revenues are lower than the previous year, or growth is less than anticipated, hard decisions have to be made.

American debt as a percentage of GDP has ballooned

I know the state and federal government budgets are apples and oranges. Actually, I can’t think of a good fruit analogy because, size alone, Georgia’s $37.7 billion state budget is a very small fraction of federal spending.

There are good reasons the U.S. government can take on debt in ways that the state of Georgia cannot. One of the most important is that our country needs debt capacity to finance our protection in cases of national emergency.

As one might expect, that is why in 1946, on the heels of World War II, the U.S. had its largest debt as a percentage of gross domestic product at 106% (important because this ratio demonstrates the ability for the government to repay that debt).

According to the Congressional Budget Office, our debt as a percentage of gross domestic product is now projected to exceed 118% in 2035. Notably, this CBO projection came out in January, long before the increased debt of the “Big Beautiful Bill” was factored in.

Massive debt is no longer for massive emergencies in our country; it is just standard operating procedure. According to the CBO, the U.S. spent more money financing our debt in 2024 than in discretionary military spending.

Credit: Handout

Credit: Handout

Like the boy who cried wolf, when there is always an “emergency,” when every moment is claimed to be an existential threat, it hampers our ability to respond to those that, God forbid, actually are.

I think of the driver who uses their car insurance policy to pay for a ding in the windshield only to pay for it multiple times over with increased car insurance premiums, or, after a few of such claims, is dropped from the policy altogether.

We are in a moment where we are seeing the impact of this debt-without-limits-to-spending approach.

Just a few weeks ago, Moody’s became the final of the big three credit rating agencies to downgrade the U.S. credit rating due to “the increase over more than a decade in government debt and interest payment ratios to levels that are significantly higher than similarly rated sovereigns.”

Let this be a long overdue wake-up call.

Talking about the budget deficit conjures up images of stodgy old men in dusty chairs.

I imagine the scene from the classic 1964 film “Mary Poppins” where the largely elderly Fidelity Fiduciary Bank board members, all dressed in black, sing to Michael, a little boy, about the importance of investing his coin, or “tuppance,” when what he really wants to do is spend it on a kindly, older lady selling bird food.

I think Disney meant us to side with the little boy here. But in the grown-up world where a magical nanny doesn’t come floating in on an umbrella and carousel horses don’t ride off into the countryside, it might behoove us to start behaving like we live in reality.

We might just need to embrace the boring. Nobody is coming in on an umbrella, so we need to start saving for a rainy day.

Hannah Heck, a lawyer, founded a public policy, advocacy and consulting practice. She lives in Atlanta and spends most of her time in board service, supporting her four children and writing about life raising a son with Down syndrome.