March 17, 2020: Trump Administration Gives Us Massive Deficits

 

3/17/20: There’s not much left to close. That means the news today is brief. We started Monday with 3,774 known coronavirus cases in the U.S. to report. As of this morning, Johns Hopkins reported 4,661. 

That number rose to 5,702 when I checked at 2:26 p.m. and will continue to rise for the foreseeable future. New York State, alone, reports more than 1,300 confirmed cases. 

Schools in 38 states are closed. Individual districts in the other twelve states have turned out the lights until further notice. According to Education Week, more than 74,000 of the nation’s 98,000 schools are shut. 

 

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Already swimming in red ink. 

LAWMAKERS AND THE PRESIDENT remain divided over what should be done to help the economy avoid plunging into recession. One idea being floated to stave off a meltdown is to give every adult $1,000 to spend. If we estimate that there are 270 million Americans, age 18 and up, the cost would be $270 billion. 

The problem, of course, is that Trump and his band of fiscal fools have already ballooned the federal deficit since taking charge – and future deficits are projected to remain high through at least 2030. 

And that’s assuming GDP growth of three percent or more per year. 

That level has not been achieved in three years under Trump. Now we’re certain to miss that mark again in 2020, by a wide margin. We know that in the first five months of Fiscal Year 2020, even before the crisis hit, the federal deficit had increased by 14.8 percent, rising from $544.2 billion in FY 2019 to $624.5 billion.

 

Now our leaders are faced with trying to goose spending to avoid falling into an even deeper recession and we’re already swimming in red ink. 

Deficits under Trump have already doubled: 

FY 2016: $587 billion (last year under President Obama). 

FY 2017: $666 billion (much of this deficit was cooked into the books before Trump took charge). 

FY 2018: $779 billion.

FY 2019: $984 billion.

FY 2020: $1 trillion, estimated (and this was before the COVID-19 outbreak).

FY 2021: $1.1 trillion, estimated.

 

By comparison, we have the “pie in the sky” thinking of the first budget submitted by the Trump administration. The federal deficit was predicted to fall by 2021 to only $456 billion. Current projections from the Congressional Budgeting Office project deficits averaging $1.3 trillion annually, until 2030.