A trillion here. A trillion there. A trillion-dollar deficit as far as the eye can see.
But don’t worry. You’re not talking about real money. This is Trump money, where reality can be manipulated to reflect anything.
So Trump can simply claim the latest CBO report showing deficits beginning in 2020 to hit more than a trillion dollars through 2029, to be fake news. Or a Democratic lie.
It’s certainly more appetizing to ignore reality than to accept it.
The U.S. budget deficit is expected to hit $960 billion in 2019, and average a whopping $1.2 trillion per year between 2020 and 2029, according to the CBO’s look ahead at the U.S. budget and economic outlook over the next decade.
The new deficit projection for 2019 rose $63 billion from the last report, which came out in May. The CBO says this is mainly because of the massive new budget deal, which passed both houses of Congress and was signed into law by Trump in early August.
“The nation’s fiscal outlook is challenging,” CBO Director Phillip Swagel said in the report. “Federal debt, which is already high by historical standards, is on an unsustainable course.”
Now, don’t worry your pretty little heads about this. After all, Medicare has been saying that spending on the program is “unsustainable” for years and the sky hasn’t fallen. Saying spending is “unsustainable” is government-speak for “at least until we can raise your taxes.”
Also, this is wartime and we should expect these deficits. What war, you ask? The trade war, of course, silly.
President Trump’s trade wars are expected to reduce the average U.S. household’s income by $580 by 2020, according to a new study by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).
That figure — which does not include new tariffs scheduled to go into effect in September and December — amounts to a significant chunk of economic growth. It is the equivalent of roughly $60 billion in lost economic activity.
“Higher trade barriers — in particular, increases in tariffs — implemented by the United States and other countries since January 2018 are expected to make U.S. GDP about 0.3 percent smaller than it would have been otherwise by 2020,” CBO Director Phillip Swagel said on Wednesday.
Even though it sounds like we’re losing the war, don’t let Democratic propaganda fool you. Our president has the situation well in hand. Besides, everyone knows that tariffs don’t cost the American people anything. They’re free.
Nobody cares about the deficit. Nobody cares to read about it. Nobody cares about me.
So why write about it? Sometime in the distant future, space aliens will send an archeological expedition to planet Earth. They will read my writings and name me “Nostradamus.”
And I don’t even have to write in quatrains.
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