Donald Trump is threatening to shut the government down if he doesn’t get billions to build his pointless border wall. But it’s a good thing Republicans have forgotten about all the threats they used to make over raising the debt ceiling, because thanks to Trump, that debt is going up faster than at any time in history. They’re going to need a crane to lift the ceiling this fast.
According to Bloomberg, the government will issue $329 billion in debt just for the third quarter, and expects that to go up to $440 billion in the final quarter. All of which, piled on already rising levels of debt, means that the government will be borrowing more money, and piling on more debt, than in any year since the economy crashed in 2008.
The deficit totaled $607 billion through the first nine months of the fiscal year that ends Sept. 30, compared with $523 billion from the same period a year earlier.
With the projections for debt at the end of the year, Trump will finish in the hole by more than $1 trillion. And the Congressional Budget Office is already forecasting that 2020 will add more then $1 trillion.
And, as Trump points out every day, if not every hour, that’s the level of debt he’s building when the economy is doing fairly well. Trump’s tax plan gave corporations a goose, but just as every economist predicted, it also tore a hole in the federal coffers. This isn’t high levels of government spending to pull the economy out of a temporary hole—it’s just everyday spending. The rising levels of debt are coming at the same time that Trump is bragging about record growth, which is just another sign of how simply unsustainable the situation remains.
If—no, when—the economy encounters a bump, Trumponomics leave the government with no option but to rack up even higher levels of debt, bringing with it a tightening money market and rising inflation. But that’s okay. Because Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin says the economy is “on the path” to sustained growth, and as long as we never, ever falter we’ll … just be running up debt at a record pace.