I was struck, no, dumbfounded by this: Debt funded all federal government spending in 2025.

The federal government plans to spend a total of $7 trillion in fiscal 2025 but only bring in $5.16 trillion in revenue. That leaves a deficit of approximately $1.8 trillion. The big four expenditures — Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, debt interest and defense — account for nearly three-quarters of national spending. All other programs — for other Cabinet departments and hundreds of agencies, including for social services, infrastructure, farmers, Amtrak, and on and on — spend about the same amount each year as the $1.8 trillion we incurred in debt.

In 1980, total debt represented 34% of the gross domestic product. This past year, the $36.2 trillion debt equaled 120% of GDP, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Annual interest payments on the national debt are greater than spending for our national defense.

Our debt endangers the future of America; Congress has failed us. They know it, but can’t bring themselves to address the problem.

After World War II, Argentina was thought to have great potential to become one of the world’s leading, wealthy nations. It had a well-educated populace, great natural resources and a temperate climate. Yet the country has been bedeviled since then by politicians who couldn’t stop spending way beyond the country’s revenues. This resulted in persistent, runaway inflation and unmanageable national debt. Argentina’s promise evaporated. According to the International Monetary Fund, the U.S. has today a per capita income of $89,000; Argentina, $14,000.

The biggest irresistible pressure to spend more is from health care, about one-third of which is paid for by government. Health care spending per capita has risen from $2,151 in 1970 (in 2023 dollars) to $14,570 per capita this year. The rise has been sharper by far in the past decade than at any earlier time.

When I was an Illinois state legislator in the 1960s, Medicaid, the federal-state program of health care for the low-income, was new and not expected to be a big program. Today, one-quarter of all Americans have their health care paid for by the program, including 60% of all nursing home residents in the country, many of whom were middle-class in their working years.

Abraham Lincoln famously said that government should do for individuals only what they cannot do better for themselves. As the world becomes ever more complex, apparently the list of individual incapacities has grown. And so has government. According to the International Monetary Fund, government spending in the U.S. rose from 2.7% of GDP in 1900 to 21% in 1950, then 32% in 2000 and nearly 50% during the COVID-19 pandemic. It stood close to 40% in 2024.

Enter President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s budget task force. They huffed and they puffed, and in their big, beautiful budget added another $3 trillion in debt, and perhaps much higher deficits than that, because of gimmicks in the bill.

The bill cut Medicaid big time. My bet is that the cuts won’t hold. Spending for Medicaid does not go to the poor; it goes directly to our sprawling health care system, where many rural hospitals (rural residents being a big part of Trump’s base) try to stave off closure.

Among other head-scratchers, the Trump-Musk budget team whacked the Internal Revenue Service — a revenue generator — and also cut billions from research, our nation’s one strong suit. To compound the research challenge, Trump has stanched the inflow of the brightest and best international students, all critical to our research enterprise. All while China passes us in research and development achievement.

Balancing the budget is complicated and difficult. The pressures are all to spend more (Democrats) and cut taxes (Republicans). The math does not work.

Ideas offered to address the deficit include: removing the cap on payroll deductions for Social Security; increasing taxes on the top 1% of incomes; eliminating “carried interest” and cutting the general government budget by, say, 10% across the board. Unfortunately, my back of the envelope figuring, from respectable sources, suggests such actions would generate only roughly $600 billion annually, against a deficit of $1.8 trillion.

We have a conundrum.

Congress must assign a bipartisan panel of unelected experts to shape proposals to balance the budget. Congress must then act, even if it means some members might fall on their swords to voters who resist tough measures.

Otherwise: Don’t cry for me, Argentina.

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Jim Nowlan was president of the Taxpayers’ Federation of Illinois, a business group, in the early 1990s. He has been a professor, politician, government executive, author, newspaper publisher and essayist. He resides in Princeton, Illinois.

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