MILLBROOK CROSSING, Ind. — A Millbrook Crossing man who said he has balanced his household budget for 19 years by declining to open the monthly statements described the federal deficit as “a number somebody else is holding.”
The deficit for fiscal 2026 was $1.992 trillion, about 12 percent higher than the $1.775 trillion recorded in fiscal 2025, according to the Treasury Department’s final tally. It was the third-highest annual deficit in U.S. history, behind only the pandemic-era deficits of 2020 and 2021. The Congressional Budget Office estimated the shortfall at about $2.0 trillion, roughly $218 billion more than the year before, with revenue up 3 percent and spending up 6 percent.
Lindqvist, a retired grain elevator bookkeeper, said the figures did not concern him because he had not read them. “I pay my bills. I pay them in full, on the first, and then I don’t open the envelope, so I know it was paid,” said Lindqvist, who lives on a county road outside town with his wife, Carol. “That’s a balanced budget. You can’t have a deficit in a house nobody’s looking at.”
He said he keeps his household finances in a kitchen drawer. Asked whether the drawer had ever shown a shortfall, he said no. “The drawer is the balance. I have never had a deficit in that drawer, because I have never looked in it,” he said.
Asked how a country could be balanced with a shortfall of nearly $2 trillion, Lindqvist said the shortfall was “for the government,” and that the government “has a lot more drawers.” He said he had seen the national debt clock once, at the public library in 2011, and that it “was a lot smaller then.” He said it had since grown “because people kept looking at it.”
Carol Lindqvist said she had asked her husband in April whether the mortgage had been paid. “He said, ‘It was paid in the spring, and it will be paid again in the fall, and in between it’s a matter of perspective,’” she said. “I stopped asking. I’m the one who opens the mail, so I have the whole picture, and I’m not allowed to say it.”
Dr. Marjorie Teller, director of the Center for Measured Outcomes, said she had reviewed Lindqvist’s method “at his request, over the phone, while he was in the car.” “In the households we surveyed that did not open their statements, 91 percent reported a balanced budget. The remaining 9 percent were holding the statements, which is where the balance went.” She said further study was needed, and that the Center had applied for the funding.
A spokesperson for the Institute for Common Sense, Dr. Chad Brickhouse, said that the Institute “does not believe in looking at a number until it has finished being one,” and that “the budget is balanced when you stop checking it, and that’s just common sense.” He was calling from a car wash.
Lindqvist said he expects the deficit to be balanced by the end of the decade, “once everyone agrees to stop reading it,” and that he would file the national budget under his bed. “It’s where I keep the things that are handled,” he said. “Nothing under there has ever come back to me.”
He said he would open the statement for his own household if the Reporter asked, and he went to get it. He returned from the kitchen a few minutes later and said the drawer was closed.