At nearly every opportunity, the GOP has made the nation's fiscal outlook worse.By Peter Suderman
http://reason.com/blog/2018/09/21/trillion-deficits-debt-republicans-trumpThe Congressional Budget Office projected in April that the federal budget deficit would hit $804 billion this year, and would top $1 trillion by 2020, two years earlier than previously projected.
Last week, the CBO reported that the federal government had already spent $895 billion more than it brought during the first 11 months of the fiscal year, an increase of $222 billion over the same period of time last year. Trillion-dollar deficits are very nearly here.
It's no secret why. Over the past year, Republicans at the federal level have cut taxes while signing onto bipartisan deals to increase spending. They have made the deficit larger at nearly every turn, and there's no sign they plan to stop.
Just this morning, President Donald Trump tweeted his displeasure with a bipartisan spending measure that passed in the Senate earlier this week. "I want to know, where is the money for Border Security and the WALL in this ridiculous Spending Bill, and where will it come from after the Midterms? Dems are obstructing Law Enforcement and Border Security." Trump had demanded $5 billion in spending for a border wall; the deal Senate Republicans cut with Democrats provides $1.6 billion. Trump, in other words, was upset because the plan doesn't spend more . . .
. . . President Trump, meanwhile, wants even more spending—a lot more—in the form of a trillion-dollar infrastructure bill financed entirely by debt. Indeed, according to Axios, Trump rejected a proposal from former White House adviser Gary Cohn to spend $200 billion in federal funds in hopes of leveraging state and local dollars. Trump preferred an idea put forth by Democrats to put the entire infrastructure bill on the federal tab. "We've just gotta spend money on this," Trump reportedly said.
Trump wants to spend money—but Republicans don't want to raise more revenue to pay for it . . .
. . . It is of course possible to substantially reduce the deficit exclusively via spending cuts. But Trump and his fellow Republicans have demonstrated repeatedly that they have no interest in the cutting spending at the scale that would be necessary. On the contrary, they have shown that they will accept higher spending for Democratic priorities in exchange for higher spending on Republican priorities, and they will pair these spending increases with tax reductions that increase the deficit even further. Kudlow may want to reduce spending down the road, but his party appears bent on increasing it now. And that, of course, is the same path that Republicans took under President George W. Bush. When the GOP has had power, it has cut taxes, but the spending cuts to match have never arrived . . .
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With Republicans like these we don't
need Democrats.----EA.
