Deficit explodes, stock market crashes, Tea Party takes to the streets
Oh wait, the president is a white guy again, so forget that last part.
The ballooning federal budget deficit under President Donald Trump will force the U.S. to borrow more than $1 trillion this year and risks worsening the frenzy behind the global sell-off in stock markets.
The budget deal Senate leaders reached late Wednesday would add nearly $300 billion in government spending over two years and push the deficit higher. Even beforehand, Bank of America Corp. senior U.S. economist Joseph Song warned in a report that the federal deficit was on track to exceed 5 percent of gross domestic product by 2019, by far the largest for the economy while at full employment since World War II.
That is “exactly the opposite of what the economic textbooks say lawmakers should be doing,” Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics Inc., said in an email. “Deficit financed tax cuts and spending increases in a full-employment economy will result in more Fed tightening and higher interest rates.”
The combined impact on the deficit of the Republican tax cuts and the spending deal over the next two years will likely exceed the $580 billion President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus added in 2009 and 2010 during the depths of the recession.
Over/under on whether Trump tweets that we should just declare bankruptcy, like he always does?