WaPo reports on Trump’s first fiscal year of governing, which in all fairness also includes the Republican-controlled Congress when apportioning applause – or blame:
It was another crazy news week, so it’s understandable if you missed a small but important announcement from the Treasury Department: The federal government is on track to borrow nearly $1 trillion this fiscal year — Trump’s first full year in charge of the budget.
That’s almost double what the government borrowed in fiscal year 2017.
Here are the exact figures: The U.S. Treasury expects to borrow $955 billion this fiscal year, according to documents released Wednesday. It’s the highest amount of borrowing in six years, and a big jump from the $519 billion the federal government borrowed last year.
Many conservatives make the mistake of believing they can draw a meaningful analogy with a typical family unit – draw up a budget, live within your means, etc etc. They ignore the fact that no family has the means at its disposal that does the United States, nor the huge variety of responsibilities. Rare is the family that can raise taxes, borrow money using Treasury bonds against which risk is considered nil, or be responsible for public epidemiology.
We have survived years and years of rolling over our debt, and so far as I can tell it’s only resulted in a new profession, that of the doomsayer of government debt. Some, I doubt not, are fully honest in their profession, but others, particularly of a conservative bent, tend to shout doom while Democrats are in power, but fall silent when their brethren are in power, even as said brethren spend those fabled tax revenues as if they were pennies.
That said, there is no doubt that the deeper in debt we go, the more costly it becomes. But at the moment it appears to be little more than an ideological spear to thrust at your opponents when convenient, to ignore when not. I worry, though, that going in deb too far may lay us open to more economic upsets in the future, although I do not lay the Great Recession at that doorstep.
The 2018 value is a projected value, of course, as WaPo notes:
Treasury mainly attributed the increase to the “fiscal outlook.” The Congressional Budget Office was more blunt. In a report this week, the CBO said tax receipts are going to be lower because of the new tax law.
And that’s the point, I suppose. Governor Brownback of Kansas recently resigned that post, having laid waste to that state government’s revenues through a similar scheme of cutting taxes and waiting for increased revenue to come pouring in. It never did, and Brownback has been shuffled off to one of the most obscure of diplomatic postings, United States Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom. A sad ending for a former Senator once considered a leading Republican light, he ends up being another conservative intellectual lightweight, putting his faith in the Laffer Curve with little thought as to its limits.
And is this what we’ll be seeing from Trump’s tax law? The initial reaction from Fortune 500 CEOs at the infamous meeting with Gary Cohn was vastly unsettling. I guess we’ll just have to settle back and watch the debt jump – particularly if we choose to indulge in a military buildup once again. And will the Republican Congress try to use the deficit they’ve created as an excuse to cut important social welfare programs? It should be interesting.
