Money rolling in

But it’s rolling out faster

TARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE he numbers are staggering, but they’ve been staggering most Americans for years now. When the numbers got into the billions some time ago, they long passed the average person’s ability to imagine the enormity.

And when the government now throws around figures like

$1 trillion and $3.5 trillion — that is, when talking about the budget and spending bills — the numbers reach beyond our timid vocabulary.

Here are some of the more interesting numbers we found in the paper’s monthly deficit round-up:

• For the current fiscal year from last October through July of this year, “the government reported that its revenue totaled a record $3.32 trillion for the period.”

• That was a 17.5% increase from the same period last year.

• Corporate taxes are up 76.2% so far this year. (So much for the Trump tax cuts being the cause for all bad things in the budget.) The government has collected $282.1 billion from corporate taxes between October and July.

• And individual income tax collection is up as well.

Money is pouring into the federal government’s bank account. Year-toyear increases may be skewed because the virus was boiling over this time last year. But the amount flowing into Washington, D.C., is still breaking historic records.

The problem, of course, is spending. For the first 10 months of the budget year, spending was up 4.4% — a record of $5.86 trillion. That means that the government is spending 4.4% more this year than it did when it was stimulating the economy with covid packages in the spring and summer of 2020. Year-to-year comparisons go both ways.

This year, experts think spending will either set a record, or be the second-highest in American history. The Associated Press story that ran Thursday also included this acknowledgment: The estimates do “not take into account the impact of two huge spending bills now advancing in Congress: a roughly $1 trillion bill to support traditional infrastructure programs such as highway construction, and a $3.5 trillion measure backed only by Democrats to deal with such issues as poverty and climate change.”

Anyone who owns a credit card could tell you that it’s hard to get out of debt if you run a deficit every year. In fact, if our math is close to correct this time, it’s impossible. Some of us are old enough to remember a president named George W. Bush. When he left office in 2008, the national debt stood at just over $10 trillion. Now it’s closing in on $30 trillion.

And it’s not because receipts are short. It’s because the government — that’s you and us, by the way, and our leaders in both major parties — can’t control spending.

We’ve said it before, but it deserves repeating until somebody hears it: If a nation can continue to spend like this without consequences, it will mark the first time in world history.