Remember When the Balanced Budget Amendment Was A Thing?

$37 Trillion in Debt and Counting

BILL ASTORE

JUN 30, 2025

With the U.S. national debt sitting at $37 trillion, it’s hard to imagine a time when Congress argued for a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. Remember when Republicans had a reputation for fiscal conservatism?

According to the non-partisan CBO, President Trump’s big beautiful bill will add another $3.3 trillion in debt over the next decade. At the same time, the bill cuts health care to poor people. This from the New York Times:

G.O.P. Bill Has $1.1 Trillion in Health Cuts and 11.8 Million Losing Care, C.B.O. Says

Analysis from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found that Republicans’ new version of the legislation would make far deeper cuts and lead to more people becoming uninsured than previous proposals.

Who needs health insurance, am I right?

Yearly interest on the national debt is now higher than the Pentagon budget, which is truly saying (and spending) a lot.

Where is all the money going? Leaving aside the cost of servicing the national debt, most of discretionary spending goes to the Pentagon, Homeland Security, and similar forces of aggression and repression. New nuclear weapons, for example, may cost $2 trillion over the next 30 years. A misnamed “golden dome” (leaky sieve is more accurate) allegedly to protect America against nuclear missile attacks may cost $500 billion or more over the next decade or two. And nothing costs as much as foreign wars, as we learned from the disastrous Iraq and Afghan Wars, which may end up adding $8 trillion to the national debt when all the bills come due.

While achieving a balanced budget isn’t easy, there are two easy ways to come closer:

  1. Tax the rich.
  2. Stop making war, downsize the empire, and focus the U.S. military on national defense and defense alone.

Option (1) is out since the rich own the government. (Welcome to Plutocracy USA.) Option (2) is also out since the military-industrial-congressional complex is the fourth branch of government and arguably the most powerful. All presidents appease it, whether their names are Bush or Biden, Obama or Trump.

So, Congress and the President do what they always do: Serve the rich and kowtow to the MICC, the National (In)Security State. Any “balancing” to be done with the federal budget will be done on the tired backs of the poor and disadvantaged. They have no lobbies, no money, no say.

Can the working classes pull America up by their collective bootstraps? America’s workers have achieved miracles before, but this is too big of an ask even for them.

4 thoughts on “Remember When the Balanced Budget Amendment Was A Thing?”

  1. Try as I might I still cannot see how this country can be called the wealthiest on earth when:

    · It has racked up $37 trillion (huh?!) in debt (and drunkenly adding to it).

    · Right, yearly interest on the national debt (14%) is higher than the Pentagon budget (12%) as percent of the 2025 federal budget.

    · The United States recorded a government debt-to-GDP ratio of 124.30% of the 2024 GDP. That means we owe (a lot) more than we produce, right? If ratios like that continue (and with the Big, Beautiful Budget-Busting bill looming as this is being written), that means it’ll take like ∞ to make some pay down on that debt, to say nothing of paying it off, right?

    · As Paul Krugman has said, “The U.S. government is — this isn’t original — best thought of as a giant insurance company with an army. When you talk about federal spending, you’re overwhelmingly talking about Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and defense. And the bulk of the insurance — all of Social Security and Medicare, about 2/3 of Medicaid — is for the elderly and disabled.

    “This is important both for assessing projections about future spending and for assessing claims about the need to shrink the government.

    “Put it this way: Whenever someone talks about making government smaller, he should be asked which of these big four he proposes cutting, and how. If he responds with generalities, he’s faking it.”

    Or DOGEing it.

    The two – indeed, the only two – most direct, sensible ways to achieve a balanced budget (if not a surplus one) is to:

    Tax the rich – A non-starter, for the more they grift their way through the economy, through society, the more they want (and get).
    Stop making war, downsize the empire, and focus the U.S. military on national defense and defense alone – Again, a non-starter, as dividends are not paid on peace, only on war.

    Can the working classes pull America up by their collective bootstraps? Well, a few questions need to be asked:

    · Just how much can workers be bled, called upon in an increasingly trimodal economy, defense (war), personal data mining (aka surveillance), and grifting, although the three are highly intertwined?

    · How many times can workers be expected to work miracles, given the galactic odds against their coming true more than a handful of times?

    · This is the 21st century, presuming that human achievement in understanding the natural world and in developing stable, sustainable social organizations has never been higher, what does it mean that we are left with relying on the occult? What odds are they giving in Vegas that that will pay off?

    We are getting one giant metaphorical proctology exam, it ain’t pretty what it’s disclosing or prognosticating.

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  2. It’s hard to imagine anything but further increases in the debt. As long as the world keeps buying US debt the scheme can continue but as your hourglass graphic implies, there will be an end to it. Being this problem is the more encompassing incompatibility of capitalism with limits.

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    1. “As long as the world keeps buying US debt the scheme can continue…”

      A key point, when are they going to catch on, or are they so into the same sleights-of-hand that they don’t – don’t want to – see what’s going on? It comes down to when will the US be unable to meet its debt obligations? Apparently there’s still a bit of time left, though the provisions of the Big, Beautiful, Budget-Busting Bill are unequivocally showing that evisceration of social welfare is the next funding source, i.e. plundering of Social Security and Medicare will let the party go on a while longer.

      One insufficiently appreciated pterosaur in the ointment is the cost of global warming. Natural disasters stemming from such are more frequent, more destructive, more costly, straining the private insurance industry and already overwhelming public, governmental insurance. This does not account for the costs to agricultural and water resources arising from changing weather and precipitation patterns. In essence, the costs of mere survival stand to be staggering, and have not entered into the economic, social, and political accounting yet.

      The response to these mounting threats has been the phasing out tax credits for wind, solar and other renewable energy in the Big, Beautiful, Budget-Busting Bill.

      Any idea what odds Vegas is giving on survival to the end of the century?

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      1. As you know, I call Trump the President of Punishment. His actions show that he is filled with spite, a billionaire out to get the poor and helpless.

        Regarding spite, his position on global warming is a good example. It is happening beyond question as shown by statistics and science. That doesn’t matter to Trump as he is out to promote and protect profit, facts be damned. This means protect petroleum profits. He is killing incentives to buy electric vehicles and made the truly outrageous suggestion that all government agencies should sell any EV’s that they have.

        Did I mention I just finished reading Chris Hedges’ book American Fascism? It covers the religious right and the alignment with what Trump is doing is perfect. It really is a not too hidden KKK kind of agenda. The KKK was very big on religion.

        BTW – at the local level, a hard worker at a restaurant I frequent who had been working there for 23 years and greeted everyone with “hello, my friend!” is gone. He was an illegal from way back. He had proven himself a worthy member of American society in every way. The chances that he would be grabbed by ICE were good. He is gone and everyone, employees and customers, misses him but there is nothing anyone can do. What can he do? No chance of another job. Did he have savings? How will he live? It is a tragedy, a needless tragedy. Trump’s approach shows no appreciation of the individual. If one is in the category to be rejected, one will be rejected. Why do we have the Statue of Liberty? Why do we celebrate the 4th of July?

        Every American should watch the movie “El Norte” and then decide what to think of illegal immigrants.

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