$895 billion deficit? Trump says "NO PROBLEM, we'll just print more money!"

Not that we didn’t know the GOP’s Tax Scam wasn’t a regressive deficit-busting Piece of Shit. But more evidence came out this week that makes it look even worse.

The U.S. budget deficit in August was $211 billion, nearly double the gap during the year-ago month, the Congressional Budget Office estimated late Monday.

Adjusted for shifts in the timing of payments that otherwise would have occurred on a weekend of holiday, the deficit would have grown by 19%. The Treasury Department will report final official numbers on Thursday, and they are usually very similar to the CBO’s….

The big picture: The budget deficit is widening in a big way. In the first 11 months of the fiscal year, the deficit was $895 billion, which is $222 billion more than the previous year. Outlays have climbed 7% while revenue rose 1%.

Corporate taxes have plummeted by 30% this fiscal year, both because of the lower rate as well as the expanded ability to immediately deduct the full value of equipment purchases. Individual income and payroll taxes have climbed 4%, as increasing wages — mostly, due to more people having jobs — offset a lower withholding rate.

And that individual income “increase” is misleading, because since the new tax rates hit paychecks after January, the CBO says withholdings are down $33 billion for the 7 months that have followed.

If you go deeper into the CBO’s budget review, the huge deficit doesn’t seem so huge, since $71 billion of it is due to Labor day weekend starting on Sept. 1 and requiring some Sept expenses to be paid on Aug. 31. But even with that adjustment, we were still $140 billion in the hole last month, and likely will exceed the projected FY 2018 deficit of $849.1 billion.

And FY 2018 is the “good year.” As was reiterated this week, wait until we we get a full year of the Tax Scam in place for FY 2019! Even the Trump Administration has admitted that the deficit will reach $1.1 trillion next year, which doesn’t seem like the Scam is “paying for itself” in growth, does it?

This was bad enough. Now it looks worse.

But don’t worry, our President had a plan to get us out of this mess of a deficit. At least until he was told by some over-eju-kay-ted egghead that he couldn’t do it.

Once he won, Trump considered an unusual approach that was quickly slapped down by his chief economic advisor, according to veteran journalist Bob Woodward's new book, "Fear: Trump in the White House," which went on sale Tuesday.
"Just run the presses — print money," Trump said, according to Woodward, during a discussion on the national debt with Gary Cohn, former director of the White House National Economic Council.

"You don't get to do it that way," Cohn said, according to Woodward. "We have huge deficits and they matter. The government doesn't keep a balance sheet like that."

Cohn was "astounded at Trump's lack of basic understanding," Woodward writes.

Yeah, that’s not really how government debts work, Donnie. Sure, in theory you could tell everyone holding US bonds that those debt instruments are being called in, and they get to get the face value (usually $1,000 apiece) in cash. But that total was $15.5 trillion as of the end of June, which makes for a helluva one-year expense on the books.

Of course, that would literally cause trillions of dollars would be floating around, likely leading to Weimar Germany-style inflation, and the creation of insane Bubbles caused by the inflow of oceans of dollars that would crash the real-world economy.

But hey, at least we wouldn’t be so heavily in “debt,” right Prez?

In addition, printing a bunch of money to pay off debts wouldn’t do anything for the $1 trillion + deficits that are projected for the next 7 years (and into infinity if Tax Scam 2 ever becomes law). So we’d resume running up our credit card immediately afterwards, except this time it would take much higher interest rates to get suckers to try to give Uncle Sam money, given that the dollars people might get back for the bonds and interest wouldn’t be worth anything. Which means the economic depression would get worse.

Can we get these GOP dimwits out of our Capitols and put in people with a clue, please?