$1 trillion deficit
Tax cuts and big spending: The party of fiscal responsibility is no more.
Funny how these things work. Let’s say you’re already deeply in debt, but you’re still spending more money than you have in the bank. Then you take a big pay cut. Then you keep on spending even more money. Anybody with a lick of sense knows where you’re headed. Eventually you’ll go broke.
Seems like a simple lesson. Too bad our Congress and our president don’t get it.
A newly released report on the federal deficit paints a grim picture of our nation’s fiscal future. And it makes clear that voters need to let our elected representatives know they can’t keep driving our government toward a financial cliff.
The Congressional Budget Office just released a new analysis predicting the federal deficit will hit $804 billion this year. Within two years, it’s expected to surpass $1 trillion.
That means the government will borrow about 19 cents for every dollar it spends this year. Paying the debt we amass on our national credit card will grow faster than any other major category of federal spending, sucking up roughly one-third of all personal income taxes by 2024. A decade from now, the nonpartisan CBO says, the national debt is projected to approach 100 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.
The blame lies with the break-thebank Republicans running Congress. The CBO’s latest deficit projections are more than 40 percent higher than the estimates it released last summer, largely because of the combination of tax cuts and spending bills passed by a bunch of hot check kiters masquerading as conservatives on Capitol Hill.
None of this should come as a surprise, even though the numbers are worse than expected. As congressional Republicans — led in the House by U.S. Rep. Kevin Brady of Houston — hastily slapped together the nation’s most radical tax reform plan in decades, the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation projected it would add roughly $1.4 trillion to the national debt. GOP supporters of this proposal trotted out their historically dubious argument that tax cuts spur enough economic growth to pay for themselves. But the JCT reported that, even accounting for the economic impact of the tax cuts, the national debt would still mushroom by an additional $1 trillion.
Now the CBO estimates government revenues will drop $1.7 trillion over the next decade, mainly because of those tax cuts. The debt hole was dug deeper by the $1.3 trillion spending bill Congress passed and President Donald Trump reluctantly signed into law last month. All told, the CBO estimates, the combination of tax cuts and spending hikes enacted since last June will drive the deficit $2.7 trillion higher than previously projected.
The U.S. has racked up huge deficits in the past, during times of war or economic downturns — that’s normal. Most recently there were trillion-dollar deficits from 2009 to 2012, but that happened during a period when the nation was trying to claw its way out of the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression. Deficit spending might even be justified for major investments, such as national infrastructure projects. But now the economy is booming, unemployment is low and we’re still racking up more debt merely to pay for tax cuts that mainly help the wealthiest Americans — that’s anything but normal. This is a time to pay down the credit cards.
If we don’t move federal budgets onto a responsible path, the next generation can expect a future of more taxes, reduced services and higher inflation — all to pay for budgets written by their parents and grandparents.
GOP politicians shrieked about deficit spending during the Obama administration, warning that the nation was veering toward an economic catastrophe. Conservative voters alarmed about the federal deficit joined the tea party movement, heading to the polls to support politicians who promised to bring the budget back under control. Now most of the GOP voices that decried deficit spending under a Democratic president are strangely silent.
Instead, a Republican-controlled Congress is ignoring basic arithmetic. Their frenzied zeal to cut taxes no matter the consequence is driving the country deeper into a chasm of debt. The Grand Old Party that once considered itself as the party of fiscal responsibility is rebranding itself as the party of big spending and sticking younger voters with the bill.
Someday the hot checks congressional Republicans are kiting will come due. And there’s nothing at all funny about how that will work.