The Washington Post reports:
The way the federal budget works is often a mystery to Americans. But it shouldn’t be to the president of the United States.
Here, the president makes a basic mistake. He asserts that even though he signed into law a bill cutting taxes in 2017, revenue has kept going up — a fact he attributes to a robust economy. Some listeners might even have gotten the impression that the tax cuts were paying for themselves — a false claim the administration made repeatedly before the passage of the tax bill.But revenue was always supposed to be going up year after year, despite the tax cuts. And revenue is way down from what had been anticipated before Congress approved the tax cuts, which (along with higher spending) is the reason the federal budget deficit is soaring despite a good economy.
…
Raw numbers don’t tell the whole story, of course. When comparing budget numbers over time, it’s generally more useful to look at revenue as a percentage of the gross domestic product (GDP), the broadest measure of the U.S. economy. As a percent of GDP, revenue was expected to drop from 17.2 percent in 2017 to 16.3 percent in 2019 and 16.4 percent in 2020, the CBO said.
That’s a key reason the federal deficit is soaring — from $665 billion in 2017 to more than $1 trillion in 2020. That’s not supposed to happen when the unemployment rate is below 4 percent. Recall that in Bill Clinton’s presidency — he raised taxes and Congress cut spending — that the budget actually went into surplus. But Trump has signed bills that cut taxes and also dramatically increased spending — the exact opposite approach.
(click here to continue reading Mr. President, here’s how the budget works – The Washington Post.)
One of my biggest wishes is for the citizens of the United States to collectively decide that the office of the President is important, and should only be staffed by competent, smart people, and not award it to someone who proves again and again he is not competent, nor smart.
