US deficit hits nearly $1 T in 2019

WASHINGTON (AP) – The Trump administration reported a river of red ink Friday.

The federal deficit for the 2019 budget year surged 26 percent from 2018 to $984.4 billion – its highest point in seven years. The gap is widely expected to top $1 trillion in the current budget year and would likely remain there for the next decade.

The year-overyear widening in the deficit reflected such factors as revenue lost from the 2017 Trump tax cut and a budget deal that added billions in spending for military and domestic programs.

Forecasts by the Trump administration and the Congressional Budget Office project that the deficit will top $1 trillion in the 2020 budget year, which began Oct. 1. And the CBO estimates that the deficit will stay above $1 trillion over the next decade.

Those projections stand in contrast to President Donald Trump’s campaign promises that even with revenue lost initially from his tax cuts, he could eliminate the budget deficit with cuts in spending and increased growth generated by the tax cuts.

Here are some questions and answers about the current state of the government’

The deficit has been rising every year for the past four years. It’s a stretch of widening deficits not seen since the early 1980s, when the deficit exploded with President Ronald Reagan’s big tax cut.

For 2019, revenues grew four percent. But spending jumped at twice that rate, reflecting a deal that Trump reached with Congress in early 2018 to boost spending.

Fiscal hawks have long warned of the economic dangers of running big government deficits. Yet the apocalypse they fear never seems to happen, and the government just keeps on spending.

There have been numerous attempts by presidents after Reagan to control spending. President George H.W. Bush actually agreed to a tax increase to control deficits when he was in office, breaking his “Read my lips” pledge not to raise taxes.

And a standoff between President Bill Clinton and House Speaker Newt Gingrich did produce a rare string of four years of budget surpluses from 1998 through 2001.