Federal deficit increases 26%

Water Cooler
#1

Federal deficit increases 26% to $984 billion for fiscal 2019, highest in 7 years

  • The U.S. Treasury on Friday said that the federal deficit for fiscal 2019 was $984 billion, a 26% increase from 2018 but still short of the $1 trillion mark.
  • The U.S. government also collected nearly $71 billion in customs duties, or tariffs, a 70% increase compared to the year-ago period.
  • The gap between revenues and spending was the widest in seven years. Defense, Medicare and interest payments ballooned the shortfall.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/25/federal-deficit-increases-26percent-to-984-billion-for-fiscal-2019.html

#2

we need to ramp federal taxes.

#3

And/or cut spending…

#4

About 50 percent of spending is social security care, Medicare, or medical. These are also the largest growing expenditures that will make the deficit worse. Cut expenditures there and people die since most of those people are poor or useless. It’s my preferred option but it’s not a popular one!

#5

there’s plenty of scope to cut the military. The US is a republic not an empire, despite what the neocons think, and we could stand to be involved in a few fewer wars and have a few fewer bases strewn across the world

As the president said of the mid-east, “let someone else fight over this long bloodstained sand.”

And there’s plenty of scope to cut the rest of government, if not the will in Congress. The US managed without an energy department until I think Jimmy Carter and without an education department until 1976 (there was an education office in what was then Health, Education, and Welfare)

25% of federal workers promised to quit to help reduce the deficit if President Trump was elected in 2016, and if they’d kept their promise, the deficit would be a lot smaller

I’d like to see a balanced budget amendment, but unless we have a constitutional convention, I can’t see it happening

#6

Military is only 700b a year. We spend about 4.5 trillion. With revenues of 3.5 trillion. Even if we were to cut military spending to 0 we’d still have a 300b deficit. It still gets much worse in the future as Medicare, medical, and social security grow exponentially as baby boomers retire. Taxes must go up while we wait for the boomers to die off and hopefully have a population with fewer old people to support and a larger demographic between 18 to 65.