As much as conservatives would like to believe that the Trump administration has been different from the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, the fact is that all three administrations have been one long disastrous continuum. Not only has Trump continued the forever wars that Bush and Obama waged, he has also continued every single socialist, interventionist, and imperialist program maintained by his predecessors, including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the minimum wage, the regulated economy, the war on immigrants, the war on drugs, the war on Muslims, the Pentagon, the military-industrial complex, the CIA, the NSA, and all the hundreds of federal welfare-warfare-state bureaucracies, departments, and agencies.
Among the big commonalities that Trump shares with Bush and Obama is his role as the nation’s Big Spender in Chief. Despite all the highfalutin rhetoric that Republicans employ to show that they, unlike liberals, are “fiscally conservative” and “fiscally responsible,” the truth is that Republicans are as committed to big-government spending as liberals, if not more so.
This phenomenon has been confirmed again by Big Spender Donald Trump, who just announced that he has cut a deal with the Democrats for a two-year “bipartisan” budget deal that busts through the budget ceiling and that raises spending limits by $320 billion. As part of the deal, they have agreed to extend the debt ceiling to after the 2021 presidential election, thereby enabling both the big-spending Republicans and the big-spending Democrats to avoid any controversy over fiscal policy during election season.
That means, of course, that the amount of federal debt that is now hanging over the American people is going to increase as well. Today it stands at more than $22 trillion. Thanks to Big Spender Trump, it’s now going to be even higher.
Oh, perhaps I should mention, in deference to Big Spender Trump, that he has told aides that he will start focusing on cutting spending in 2021, after he is reelected. If that’s not a laugher, I don’t know what is. But I’ll guarantee you that his blindly loyal supporters will swallow it, hook, line, and sinker.
To put things into perspective, according to the Washington Post,
The debt has grown from about $19 trillion when Trump took office to more than $22 trillion this month. The government must pay interest on the money it borrows, and this year it will pay more than $350 billion to finance its borrowing.
Yes, you read that right: Big Spender Trump and his fellow “fiscally responsible” big-spending Republican cohorts, with the full sport of their big-spending Democratic partners, has increased the federal debt by a whopping $3 trillion.
Do you recall when Trumpsters and Trumpistas were glowing over their leader’s tax cut? They said, “Oh, this is fantastic. It will mean that people will work harder, producing more tax revenues. We will grow our way out of the deficit and the debt.”
It was voodoo economics then and it remains voodoo economics today. The problem is the spending, something that big-spending Republicans love to rail against but also love to do nothing about it.
After all, they are not about to touch the big untouchables — Social Security, Medicare, and the military-intelligence establishment. Given that they’re not going to dismantle or even reduce any of those programs, their exclamations against big spending are nothing but empty words.
Ultimately, there will be a reckoning. The debt ceiling is an implicit acknowledgement that too much debt is a bad thing. Yet, when the ceiling is raised every time it’s reached, that bad thing becomes an increasingly very bad thing. A nation whose government continues to incur massive amounts of debt every year, is a nation that will ultimately begin to cave in on itself. Just see Greece. And keep one thing in mind: Unlike Greece, there will be no nation willing or able to bail out the U.S. government, especially given the large antipathy toward the U.S. government all over the world.
What will the feds do when that day of reckoning arrives? One possibility is the re-confiscation of people’s gold, which is what Big Spender Franklin Roosevelt did when he was president. Another possibility is the confiscation of 401(k)s and other retirement accounts, which is what the Argentine government did when its day of big-spending and big-debt day of reckoning arrived.
Big Spender Trump and his fellow big-spending Republicans are nothing more than a continuation of the Bush-Obama administrations. When will the over-taxed and debt-ridden American people decide that enough is enough?