The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has spent years repeatedly sounding the alarm on our ballooning federal budget and looming debt crisis, but deficit projections have finally spiked to the dystopian levels spending hawks have long feared. Annual deficits topping $1 trillion are now slated to be the norm indefinitely, and, in 30 years, the CBO estimates our debt-to-GDP ratio will catapult to 180%, a whopping 30 points higher than its projection from under a year ago.
Naturally, as the Republican Party stopped pretending to care about explosive deficits, many in the media have begun to pay lip service to it. Critics are right to lambaste the hypocrisy of Republicans, but President Trump’s fiscal malfeasance isn’t what he is doing on fiscal policy. It’s what he refuses to do.
Trump budgets will add more vastly more to the public debt over the next 10 years according to CBO pic.twitter.com/hvpLstn1uW
— David Frum (@davidfrum) February 18, 2020
To put it another way, relative to the size of the US economy, Trump’s deficits will require more borrowing than fighting and winning the Second World War – all per CBO. pic.twitter.com/M3pLfGLXNC
— David Frum (@davidfrum) February 18, 2020
Frum is correct that Trump has signed bipartisan budgets so big that the CBO has been forced to update spending projections. But our projected deficit doomsday isn’t because of any single package signed by Trump. It’s instead overwhelmingly due to mandatory spending growth and subsequent interest increases.
In the next decade, our discretionary spending is due to fall by 0.8% as a percentage of GDP. A small subsection of mandatory outlays, including unemployment and food stamps, will also fall by 0.4%. But Social Security spending will skyrocket by 1.1%, and major healthcare program spending, including Medicare and Medicaid, will soar by 1.6%.
Trump shouldn’t be signing wasteful budgets, but those billions he authorized are just drops in the bucket compared to the storm of debt incurred by Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. If Frum wants to blame Trump for our debt projection, he ought to aim his fire on nearly every member of both political parties who vehemently refuses to touch entitlements.
Frum’s right to fear our debt bomb, but the problem is much larger and has loomed much longer than Trump.
