Iwas sorting through childhood papers in a spring clean and came across a class project of my husband’s from elementary school where the question was asked, “What would you do if you ran the country?”

In 1990, my future husband as a third grader answered, “Balance the budget.” This showed me, first, that I married the right kind of person for me and, second, times sure have changed.

The U.S. House last week adopted the formally titled “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” a budget bill that the Congressional Budget Office preliminarily estimated would add $2.3 trillion to the debt in the next decade and that some expect to be as high as $3.1 trillion with the final version of the bill.

This all made me curious what U.S. government spending was in 1990. It was $1.8 trillion (in 1989, the year pr

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