The annual budget deficit for 2020 and beyond will, in all likelihood, surpass one trillion dollars.
This is while the country is not in a recession.
The reason for this increase in the deficit. It is largely due to the Trump Tax Cuts for the one percent that did not pay for themselves. Wasteful spending on defense, the trade wars that have not been easy to win, and no long term fiscal and investment strategy to move the country forward in a sustainable path are other causes for this ballooning deficit.
People familiar with the history and the recent political trajectory of the two major political parties over the last 40 years should not be surprised with Republican mismanagement, fueled by what Paul Krugman calls “Zombie” economic ideas, that has brought an over 22 fold increase in the national debt since 1981.
What should gall people more is the profound hypocrisy from Republicans when deficits occur on their watch.
When Ronald Reagan raised the national debt from one trillion which took 200 years to accrue to over four in eight years, where was the Republican outrage on deficits?
When first-term popular vote loser George W. Bush took an inherited surplus and blew it on two unpaid tax cuts, an unpaid war in Iraq and a partially unpaid Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit, where was the Republican outrage on deficits?
When the current popular vote loser President and his allies passed the major tax cut without paying for it, that has led to trillion-dollar deficits for 2020, where has been the Republican outrage on deficits?
You can probably hear the crickets in the rooms where most of the right-wing pundits are working in silence.
Over the last 30 years, there have been two general reactions by Republicans when Presidents try to prudently manage the economy.
The first reaction on deficits is when they ridicule Presidents like George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Barrack Obama when they pass tax increases on the rich to bring deficits down, saying it is the wrong strategy to combat the national debt because it will bring down the economy. Here is a quick history lesson. Economic expansion occurred after Bush, Clinton, and Obama tax increases (the Reagan ones too but Republicans seem to have a memory lapse when it comes to that inconvenient truth.)
