The rest of the story

You can’t blame President Trump for stressing the low unemployment rate and the high stock market, but now for the rest of the story.

The Baltimore Sun reports in an op-ed by Alexander R.M. Boyle that our national debt has now passed $23 trillion. It was under $20 trillion when Trump took office, and he promised to bring it down. That isn’t the only bad news the Trump administration probably would like to hide. Recently released data from the Labor Department indicates that over 500,000 fewer jobs were added in 2018-19 than originally expected, making 2019 the weakest job growth in the past eight years.

Apparently the public isn’t aware that Trump’s tax relief has done little other than widen income inequality and raise our annual deficit and debt. Interest on our national debt exceeded $400 billion last year and most of that money went to the Bank of China, which loans us money. Isn’t it ironical that we must borrow money from a large communist country to pay on our debt? Future generations will be burdened with our debt, which could reach $34 trillion by the end of this decade, Boyle says.

Both Democrats and Republicans in Congress have allowed the deficit to balloon, and they seem to be doing almost nothing to stop it. An acrossthe-board 20 percent cut in spending would be a start, but neither party in Congress seems to have the guts to make it happen.

I consider myself a moderate on most things, but I’m a fiscal conservative when it comes to spending money the nation doesn’t have.

VERNON McDANIEL

Ozark