Robbing Peter to pay Paul. Robbing the poor to pay the rich. Robbing the future to pay the present.
That's the way we like it and we're damned good at it.
Sure it's a one way street to the cliff edge. Sure, there's a day of reckoning. Still, that's the way we like it.
The most blatant example is Donald Trump, a pillaging grifter extraordinaire. Trump, president of the United States of America, is always in hot pursuit of the easy score, even if he often struggles for it and fails. His grand vision is the measure of his attention span which is, often, a single daily news cycle. He'll make some grand pronouncement today and then contradict that with another grand pronouncement tomorrow without even acknowledging that he's in a non-stop chase after his own tail.
The American economy is booming. Trump and his advisors tell us that at every opportunity. Everybody's rich to hear him tell it. Only it's a game of three card monte and the American people are placing sucker bets.
A report in today's New York Times warns that the Trump government, with America's bubbling economy, is looking at a new benchmark next year - a trillion dollar deficit. How can a government, presiding over a national economy that is so economically buoyant, rack up a trillion dollar deficit.
Even the Pharaohs knew that, when the Nile delivered a bumper harvest, part of the bounty should be set aside in granaries as a reserve for the bad years when there wouldn't be enough to go around. 20th century economist, John Milton Keynes, championed a more sophisticated version of the wisdom of the ancients. Government's job is to use its taxing power to fill the treasury in good times so that it has a reserve of cash to inject into the economy to prevent it from crashing in downturns.
The bloated orange Icarus will have none of that prudence nonsense. The rich need those tax cuts. Defunding the federal government is what keeps those Titans of Industry happy.
Recent talk of another major recession looming has the Mango Mussolini soiling his dainties. And so he ponders ways to prop up the economy with money he doesn't have.
The federal budget deficit is growing faster than expected, even as President Trump muses about more tax cuts and other ideas that would add to government debt.
The deficit will reach $960 billion for the 2019 fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30, and $1 trillion for the 2020 fiscal year, the Congressional Budget Office said in updated forecasts released on Wednesday. Previously, it had projected an $896 billion deficit for 2019 and $892 billion for 2020. Those numbers would be even higher, if not for lower-than-expected interest rates, which are reducing the cost of servicing the national debt.
Rising deficit projections are the result of sluggish growth in federal revenue after Mr. Trump’s 2017 tax cuts went into effect, and several bipartisan agreements to raise military and nondefense domestic discretionary spending, which Mr. Trump signed into law.
Typically, the budget deficit shrinks when unemployment is low. Mr. Trump’s administration has defied that trend.About that signature attention span?
On Wednesday, Mr. Trump said he was not looking to push through a tax cut right now, a reversal from his comments on Tuesday, when he said he was looking at both a payroll tax cut and indexing capital gains for inflation.
As a private businessman, Trump declared bankruptcy six times, Mound. In his seventy-three years, he's learned absolutely nothing. That is truly remarkable.
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ReplyDeleteYeah, fair enough Owen but how did the American people develop this mass psychosis he rides on?