Trump said Government was Too Stupid
When Donald Trump was originally elected President, I was out there warning, that budget deficits under the Trump Presidency are going to be huge. Donald Trump never ran as a fiscal conservative or a Libertarian. He didn’t say government was too big, he just said it was too stupid. He promised just to be smarter. He didn’t say he would make government smaller, only that he would make it more efficient. He would do a better job of using big government than politicians who have held the office before him.
Trump Promised More Spending
So it was my feeling that a Trump Presidency was going to result in increasing the budget deficits that would be necessary to finance a bigger government. Also, Donald Trump never promised to cut government spending; cut entitlements. In fact, he promised the opposite. He promised not to touch entitlements, to allow them to continue to expand. He promised to spend more money on the military, more money on our vets, more money on infrastructure, more money to build a wall. So I knew all of this would result in bigger deficits.
“Gentlemen’s Agreement” to Raise the Debt Ceiling
But now, my suspicions have been confirmed. Now we have news that Donald Trump has basically made a “gentlemen’s agreement” with Chuck Schumer to repeal the debt ceiling completely. There has been some debate again about raising the debt ceiling, we have this charade every year or so, where everybody pretends that they might not raise the ceiling and they raise it anyway. We had a similar political theater going on until Donald Trump cut a deal with the Democrats to extend the last suspension of the debt ceiling for another 90 days. That’s when we found out that they had also been working on this deal to eliminate the ceiling altogether.
Never Really Paying Off Bills
In recent years, the political spin has always been that lifting the debt ceiling is the politically, fiscally responsible thing to do. That America always pays her bills, and because we always pay our bills, we have to raise the debt ceiling. Ironically, they have it backwards. The reason they have to raise the debt ceiling is because America never pays her bills. If we paid our bills, we wouldn’t have any debt.
Debt Ceiling was a Brake on Government Spending
What government wants to do is to continue to not pay the bills; to continue to borrow the money so that we can pretend to pay the bills. And the obstacle to increase debt is the debt ceiling. Of course, we always raise that ceiling every time we approach it, but the fact that the ceiling is there, must provide some type of brake on government spending.
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