Donald Trump promised to balance the budget if elected president, but new data shows that he has already run up more of a deficit in less than three years than all four years of Barack Obama’s second term.
Former Obama staffer Steve Schale pointed out this fact in a tweet on Monday and told the world not to get its hopes up that Fox News would be covering the news any time soon.
Trump has run up more of a deficit in less than 3 years than all 4 years of Obama’s second term.
I’m sure @foxnewsalert is breathlessly all over this. https://t.co/a07fjYAfA8
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— Steve Schale (@steveschale) August 12, 2019
Deficit spending this year has already surpassed last year’s total
It hasn’t even been a full fiscal year, and Trump’s deficit spending in 2019 has already blown through last year’s total.
As Bloomberg reported on Monday, “The gap grew to $866.8 billion in the first 10 months of the fiscal year, up 27% from the same period a year earlier, the Treasury Department said in its monthly budget report on Monday.”
“That’s wider than last fiscal year’s shortfall of $779 billion — which was the largest federal deficit since 2012,” the report added.
Republicans don’t care about deficits
Republicans like to ramble on about deficit spending, but only when a Democrat is in the White House. With Trump, they haven’t made a peep about soaring government spending driven by their tax scam.
The irony, of course, is that under Barack Obama the deficit was cut by more than half over the course of his two terms. In his first year, in the midst of the Great Recession, the deficit stood at a staggering $1.4 trillion. In 2016, Obama’s final year, it was $587 billion.
Under Trump, the economy has also created fewer jobs than when Obama was in office. As I noted earlier this month, Trump’s economy is lagging behind Obama’s by nearly 30,000 jobs per month.
So if you’re keeping score at home, Donald Trump is losing, both on government spending and job creation.
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Sean Colarossi currently resides in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and was an organizing fellow for both of President Obama’s presidential campaigns. He also worked with Planned Parenthood as an Affordable Care Act Outreach Organizer in 2014, helping northeast Ohio residents obtain health insurance coverage.
