Last year, Illinois Democrats vilified the GOP’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The sweeping tax and spending package included significant cuts to health care, food assistance and education while foisting new costs onto the states.

As of today, however, not everyone is complaining. After all, have you seen the size of those federal tax refunds?

As the April 15 tax deadline approaches, refunds are going out now. And for many American taxpayers, they are indeed more generous this year. That fact will surely be a GOP talking point in the run-up to the midterm elections.

Part of the reason for the big payouts is that Uncle Sam did not update withholding tables to reflect the new tax law approved last summer. As a result, throughout 2025, paychecks were reduced by more than the amounts needed for the Internal Revenue Service. Now the IRS is essentially giving back extra money withheld last year.

The Big Bill also added new deductions for tip income, overtime earnings and auto-loan interest, with limits and exceptions, of course. Even more significant, it raised the 2025 tax year’s standard deductions by $1,500 for married couples filing jointly, $1,125 for heads of households and $750 for single filers, or married couples filing separately.

There was also a silver lining for the beleaguered Land of Lincoln: Prodded by high-tax states like Illinois, Congress temporarily boosted the deduction for state and local taxes, or SALT, from $10,000 to $40,000. Even Gov. JB Pritzker, no fan of the Big Bill, admitted the SALT change was a plus for Illinois, and it is contributing to higher refunds.

We strongly supported the change: It’s simply unfair to assess federal tax on income that’s already going for other taxes. And practically any relief is welcome when the Chicago area’s property tax bills have shot up at twice the rate of inflation over the past three decades. (Thank you, Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas, for publicizing that alarming tidbit.)

With higher standard deductions and new goodies available for those who itemize, federal tax refunds as of last month were running 10.6% above the previous year, according to early IRS filing data. That’s a big jump in a short time.

We realize that nobody likes paying taxes and everyone likes a healthy refund. Unfortunately, there’s another side to the story that neither political party is addressing.

Gone are the days of deficit hawks, fiscal conservatives and Tea Party penny-pinchers. The Republican Party is now led by a president who once told critics of his deficit spending and growing national debt, “Who the hell cares about the budget?”

President Donald Trump has a point. After hearing for decades about a debt crisis that never materialized, voters have deprioritized the issue.

Democrats want social spending to provide a decent safety net for the poor; Republicans want tax cuts to stimulate the economy. No one, evidently, wants to cut spending or raise federal taxes, and that’s especially true when it comes to Social Security and Medicare, the big drivers of long-term deficits.

As a consequence, the national debt is on track to surpass a once unthinkable $40 trillion later this year. And that’s not even counting unfunded liabilities from the entitlement programs.

By reducing tax revenues and increasing some areas of spending, the Big Bill is expected to add as much as $4.1 trillion to the debt over 10 years — and more if temporary tax cuts like the SALT deduction are made permanent.

Obviously, this can’t go on forever. Just ask the one strong voice of fiscal sanity left in Washington, D.C.

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell recently told a group of students that America can handle its current level of debt, but not if it keeps piling more debt on top.

Powell has sounded the same warning for years, only to be ignored. And he is clearly wary about telling people the sky is falling. No one knows the breaking point, he admitted.

But as long as the debt keeps growing faster than the economy, as it is today, the U.S. is digging itself into a deep hole. The fiscal trajectory is “not sustainable,” Powell said. “It will not end well if we don’t do something fairly soon.”

Although Powell didn’t specify what he meant by “not end well,” we can easily guess: inflation, higher borrowing costs, slow job growth, tax increases, cuts to government services and a pox on younger generations left to clean up the mess being created by today’s older generations.

Who doesn’t love a refund? But let’s at least start trying to pay for them.

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