President Donald Trump is Making America Great Again by spending more. He is adopting the policies of the Reagan era – tax cuts without spending cuts – and he isn’t concerned one iota. In fact, the president has hardly spoken about the ballooning budget deficit, and the Republicans don’t seem too keen on getting spending under control, except for perhaps Senator Rand Paul (R-KY).
The Treasury Department recently issued its monthly statement from March. And it isn’t pretty.
The government collected $210.88 billion in receipts: $98 billion in Social Security and payroll tax, $88 billion in individual income tax, $5 billion in corporate tax, and $20 billion in other taxes. This represents a 2.7 percent drop from the same time a year ago.
The government spent $420 billion in March, jumping seven percent from just under $393 billion. Here is how the state spent your tax dollars: $85 billion on Social Security, $75 billion on Medicare, $58 billion on defense, and $170 billion on other outlays. But a figure that should turn heads is the interest on the debt, which totaled $33 billion last month.
Overall, for fiscal year 2018, the budget deficit has topped $600 billion, and this is just the first six months of the fiscal year. It could easily climb above $1 trillion once again.
These numbers come soon after the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) sounded the fiscal alarm on rising debts and deficits in the age of Trump (SEE: CBO: U.S. budget deficit to top $1 trillion by 2020, debt-to-GDP to surpass 100%).
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