RUTHFULLY YOURS

The next time you hear someone complaining that DOGE is “slashing” federal spending or “dismantling” the government, pay close attention. There will almost certainly be an important fact left out: The gargantuan federal deficit.

Every day brings a new sob story about how someone is being hurt by Elon Musk’s chainsaw because some federal program is being shut down, or because a precious federal job has been axed.

Never in any of these is any context provided. And in this case, context is everything.

By the time President Donald Trump took office – four months into the new fiscal year (which started last October), the federal government was already $840 billion in the red. That’s a 58% increase from the prior year.

If all goes well, the deficit for this year will total $1.9 trillion, according to the Treasury Department, which would be the third annual increase.

The result is that the national debt is now $37 trillion – more than double what it was a decade ago. Interest on the debt took off like a rocket under Joe Biden.

None of this is sustainable.

And if anyone suggests to you that Trump’s 2017 tax cuts are to blame, they aren’t.

This year, revenues will equal 18.7% of the nation’s GDP. That’s well above the postwar average of 17.2% – and it is a level that has been topped only seven times in the past 80 years.

Too much spending, not too little taxation, is the problem.

This year, federal spending is on course to equal 25% of GDP, which is significantly higher than the 20% postwar average, and a level topped only twice since World War II – (both times because of massive COVID spending).

Not all of this is Joe Biden’s fault. The federal government has not run a balanced budget since 2001. Ten of the past 20 years have seen annual deficits above $1 trillion. Runaway entitlements are making it nearly impossible to balance the budget. And Republicans have often proved just as eager as Democrats to spend money we don’t have.

But Biden made everything much, much worse.

Why is this context always missing from all those “slashing” stories?

Because Democrats and the press don’t want the public to know just how dire the nation’s fiscal situation is. The public is already generally supportive of DOGE’s efforts to eliminate waste. But if it knew just how bad things were, support for deep spending cuts would only increase.

The same is true for Medicaid. Democrats are howling about proposals to cut Medicaid spending by $800 billion – over 10 years.

What’s never mentioned is the fact that Medicaid spending shot up 68% over the past decade. If the government simply returned to what Medicaid spent the year Biden took office, it would save almost $700 billion over the next decade.

Trump has promised to drain the swamp. He’s off to a fast start. But it will take much more than a few months of high-profile cancellations of grants and firings to get the budget under control. The Golden Age might be upon us, but it will be smothered in its crib if Democrats, weak-kneed Republicans, and a corrupt media keep playing the same games that got us into this mess in the first place.