When it comes to the U.S. budget deficit, the nation is basically divided into two worlds. In the Republicans’ world, Donald Trump has successfully cut the deficit in half, the White House is bringing fiscal “sanity” to the nation’s capital, and the GOP is demonstrating that it “is the party of fiscal responsibility.”
In that world, up is down, day is night, no one has access to the internet, gaslighting is the national pastime, and facts and arithmetic have no meaning.
As for the other world (better known as “reality”) there’s fresh evidence that everything Republicans have said about this issue is the opposite of the truth. The Associated Press reported:
The U.S. budget deficit in July climbed 20% this fiscal year compared to the last despite the U.S. taking in record income from President Donald Trump’s tariffs, according to Treasury Department data released Tuesday. … A Treasury official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preview the data said overall increased spending is in part due to a mix of expenditures, including growing interest payments on the public debt and cost-of-living increases to Social Security payouts, among other costs.
The president would have Americans believe the budget deficit is no longer a real issue because his tariffs are generating revenue. But while it’s true that tariffs are bringing in some money — roughly $152 billion through July — the latest data from the Treasury Department makes clear that this revenue isn’t nearly enough to prevent the deficit from growing rapidly during the first year of Trump’s second term.
Just this week, the Treasury Department also reported that the overall national debt has surpassed $37 trillion. (Whether the White House will claim that this figure is “fake,” or take steps to fire the officials responsible for overseeing the data, is unclear.)
Even longtime skeptics of deficit hawkery are starting to worry that the nation’s finances are spinning wildly out of control.
Those concerns are hardly outrageous. Trump added nearly $8 trillion to the national debt in his first term (most of it before the Covid crisis), and the incumbent president recently signed into law a Republican megabill that’s set to add an additional $5 trillion to the debt.
What’s more, The New York Times reported last month that the far-right domestic policy package won’t merely add trillions of dollars to the debt, it will also reduce the amount of tax revenue the country collects for decades. “Such a shortfall could begin a seismic shift in the nation’s fiscal trajectory and raise the risk of a debt crisis,” the Times added.
A few days ago, Republican Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina appeared on Fox News to suggest that Democrats were unaware of the size of the national debt. At least in this world, however, the senator appeared to get the partisan landscape backwards.
