'It's the Spending, Stupid!'

Townhall.com ^ | July 2, 2019 | Stephen Moore

[Kaslin]

The Congressional Budget Office has just released its mid-year update on the federal fiscal situation, and it portends a debt avalanche. But don't bother to tell Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren that. They're busy advocating tens of trillions of dollars in new federal spending.

The new report shows that budget deficits are expected to remain in the $1 trillion territory for years to come. It appears that 13-digit deficits are the new normal in Washington, as spending inexorably keeps rising by hundreds of billions of dollars a year.

This spend-and-borrow forecast ranges from troublesome to panic-room sheer terror — depending on your perspective. I'm in the former, not the latter frame of mind for now — in part because Congress is anticipating a rate of growth of 1.8 percent annual growth, which is about one-and-a-half percentage points below our historical 3.25 percent growth. If Donald Trump can continue to grow the economy at a faster pace, the burden of this debt will at least stabilize.

But it is still vitally important to understand how we got into this mess and how we can start to gradually bend the debt curve down.

To listen to the Democrats, you would believe that the red ink is a result of the Trump tax cut. But look at the three numbers below and make up your own mind: — 2017: $3.316 trillion — 2018: $3.330 trillion — 2019: $3.511 trillion (CBO projection, May 2019)

These are the total federal tax collections as recorded by the Congressional Budget Office for 2017, the year before the Trump tax cut, and 2018 and 2019, the two years after the Trump tax cut. Notice that the 2018 number is $14 billion higher than the 2017 number. The 2019 revenues are nearly $200 billion higher than before the tax cut.

In 2018 and 2019, federal tax collections were higher than in any previous year in history. Most people outside of the Washington swamp would rationally conclude from this that we do not have a revenue problem in Washington.

What we do have is a binge-spending problem, and it's getting worse. Last year, Congress approved spending bills that lifted expenditures by some $128 billion. The year before that, the increase was $160 billion. So much for Republicans professing to be the party of limited government and balanced budgets.

The CBO numbers also tell us that while revenues are expected to rise gradually over time as a share of the national economy, the spending sprays off the Capitol dome like Old Faithful. Spending is expected to rise from 21 percent of GDP to 23 percent of GDP over the next decade, and to about 26 percent of GDP over the two decades after that.

Again, none of this even includes the added price tag for the tens of trillions of dollars in additional spending appropriated in the Democratic presidential candidate playbook to pay for Medicare for All, reparations, student loan forgiveness, free college, guaranteed income, and the Green New Deal.

My Heritage colleagues have drafted a playbook with reasonable spending caps and elimination of scores of wasteful and obsolete programs that would bring us to a balanced budget without taxes.

We don't have a revenue problem in Washington; we have a chronic overspending crisis. And if the Democrats on the debate stage these last few days take power, things are going to get a lot worse in a hurry.

[Lurkinanloomin]

I stopped worrying about the debt when I realized it won’t be our country much longer.

[PGalt]

https://www.usdebtclock.org

CONgre$$ - current and past should be in federal prison. Their assets confiscated.

List of Grievances: LOOTING the republic.

6. But the grand nostrum will be a public debt...

http://home.hiwaay.net/~becraft/FRENEAUbanking.html

[Uncle Miltie]

Spending itself is the tax.

It matters not whether taxes raised are equal to spending, or whether taxes raised are $0.00.

In the latter case, the currency is merely printed and thereby debased, stealing just enough value from the citizenry through inflation.

Markets automatically adjust to these facts on the ground.

We ain’t stupid.

[MrEdd]

It doesn’t matter in the slightest how much you spend or do not spend if hoards of illegals flood in and invade your country.

[Buckeye McFrog]

Apparently Republicans in Congress aren’t the least bit concerned about it.

[central_va]

It doesn’t matter in the slightest how much you spend or do not spend if hoards of illegals flood in and invade your country.

Cloward and Piven would agree 100%.

[central_va]

If the GOPe was concerned then the average import tariff would be in the 20%+ range.

[PeterPrinciple]

Spending money does generate economic activity, but it does not necessarily generate wealth.

The classic example of generating wealth is tiling a non productive wet field so that it can generate a crop and more wealth.

Computers initially generated wealth by helping make better decisions. Now days they are used for bureaucracy and reports.

Where is the wealth potential these days, not sure. All I see is wealth consumption.

[bert]

For those of you in Rio Linde, the GOP is not stupid. Unlike you no others of condsewuence worship at the alter of tariffs.

BTW....... how’re those Mexican tariffs working out for you?

[central_va]

The GOPe has totally sold out the globalist Free Traitor big agriculture lobby. Trump is all we have FOR NOW. (AD) After Donald the GOPe is finished. Why? The GOPe is NOT LEARNING FROM TRUMP, it is eschewing populism, re-industrialization and closed borders. IT IS STILL, AND WILL ALWAYS BE, THE "CHEAP LABOR EXPRESS".

The policy of "waiting out Trump" is not gong to work. WE WILL REMEMBER.

[Dick Bachert]

In the 1980’s, Larry McDonald and a handful of others predicted that we were headed to a very bad place.
Now, 4 decades later, those dire predictions are becoming reality. We can stop it, but time is short!
The shorthand for Larry’s warning is this: A nation can VOTE socialism IN. But history tells us that socialism ALWAYS moves to communist TYRANNY. And the only way to escape TYRANNY is to shoot your way OUT!
https://www.brighteon.com/6054739292001

[PGalt]

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.” ― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn , The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

[Dick Bachert]

Yep. One of my favorite passages from that momentous work!
2 MINUTE VIDEO
SOCIALISM:  You can vote your way in. But you’ll have to SHOOT YOUR WAY OUT!
https://www.brighteon.com/6039981365001

[Dick Bachert]

Yep. One of my favorite passages from that momentous work!
2 MINUTE VIDEO
 https://www.brighteon.com/6039981365001
SOCIALISM:  You can vote your way in. But you’ll have to SHOOT YOUR WAY OUT!
https://www.brighteon.com/6039981365001

[MrEdd]

But the people who voted for either McCain or Romney did not comprehend this on even the very most basic level.

Had either of those two carried a win, then the immigration crisis would have been caused to accelerate immediately with the mainstream press in full attack mode about how bad it was while the Democrats in Congress kept Republicans from reigning it in. The Republican party would have gotten equal blame in the site of those who only pay attention to politics every fourth November.

Because those two were blocked from office, there was still a Republican Party in existence for Trump to perform a hostile takeover on.

[PGalt]

Thanks for the ping, posts, links.

Happy Independence Day!