The federal budget deficit is estimated at nearly $1 trillion for the 2019 fiscal year, the highest it has been in seven years, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
The CBO projects the deficit for this fiscal year to hit $984 billion, the highest it has been since 2012. The deficit has now risen to 4.7 percent of the country’s GDP.
There have only been four years where the deficit topped $1 trillion, and all four came in the wake of the 2007-08 financial crisis.
The deficit grew by $205 billion, or about 26 percent, from 2015 to 2018, Trump’s second year in office.
Since Trump took office, he pushed for a massive tax cut that blew a huge hole in the deficit while approving spending increases year after year.
Trump vowed to eliminate deficit. He’s increased it every year.:
During his 2016 campaign, Trump vowed not only to eliminate the entire federal deficit but also the nation’s $22 trillion debt. Instead, the deficit has repeatedly increased since he took office.
Trump inherited a budget deficit of $585 billion when he took office. That number rose to $665 billion in 2017 and to $779 billion in 2018.
"We're not a rich country. We're a debtor nation...We've got to get rid of the $19 trillion in debt," Trump told the Washington Post in 2016. "I think I could do it fairly quickly...I would say over a period of eight years.”
Treasury to borrow another $1 trillion to pay for Trump tax cuts:
In 2018, Axios reported that Trump’s tax cuts increased US borrowing by 84 percent, rising to nearly $1 trillion. Earlier this year, the Treasury Department announced it will have to borrow another $1 trillion to cover the cost of the deficit made greater by the strain of the tax cuts.
“Treasury borrowing surpassed $1 trillion during President Obama's first term as government spending soared amid the stimulus to combat the 2008 financial crisis, but it has steadily declined in the years since, settling down to $519 billion in 2017 before nearly doubling last year,” Axios reported in January.
The tax cuts overwhelmingly favor rich taxpayers and corporations.
