Driving up the deficit

W eren’t the Republicans supposed to be the party of deficit hawks? Birds of plunder is a more apt description.

The Congressional Budget Office last week published its estimate of the Fiscal Year 2018 federal budget deficit. The deficit increased to $782 billion, a 17 percent increase from the year before, reaching 3.9 percent of GDP, also up.

This should not be happening. The economy is going strong. Unemployment is low. The nation had an opportunity to reverse its deficit spending and start to lower the national debt, which now stands at $21.6 trillion, or $66,000 per citizen.

Normally, times of economic growth boost revenues and lower deficits. This was the case in the 1990s when, during the administration of Democrat Bill Clinton, the nation last showed a surplus. Instead, in FY 2018, revenue growth was the eighth lowest in past 50 years, according to the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

And the reason for those anemic revenues is unprecedented and politically produced. The seven lower years coincided either with recessions or with tax cuts implemented to try to pull the country out of a recession. This time, Republicans insisted on providing a massive tax cut, geared primarily at the wealthy, when economic doctrine suggested there was no need for one, given the economy was already growing.

Without the tax law, the deficit would have shrunk by $116 billion, the CBO calculated.

Further, the Republican Congress provided no substantial budget cuts to offset the loss of revenues tied to its tax reductions. So the deficit grew, and it is only going to get worse with the revenue losses growing this fiscal year as the full extent of the tax cuts are felt.

The Republican Congress and President Trump are leading the nation down a reckless path. Those who elected them expecting fiscal discipline should feel bamboozled.