April 27, 2024
This is an excerpt from David Stockmans book: Trump's War on Capitalism.
As it happened, the US Congress acted like greased lightning, enacting the $2.2 trillion CARES act virtually sight unseen just eleven days after The Donald's March 16 press conference initiated the Covid lockdowns. The bill was over eight hundred pages long and included a more ostentatious cornucopia of spend- ing authorities and free stuff than had ever before been imagined in even the most profligate quarters of Capitol Hill. This tsunami of money amounted to roughly $6,000 for every man, woman, and child in America, or 45 percent of all federal government expen- ditures in 2019.
The money was literally shoveled into the US economy in mas- sive dollops with virtually no eligibility standards, qualification pro- cesses, and enforcement/accountability procedures. This included:
- $425 billion for the Federal Reserve to support business loans and bailouts.
- $75 billion for direct subsidies to airlines and other industries.
- $350 billion to launch what became the notoriously corrupt SBA-operated Paycheck Protection Program (PPP for small businesses).
- $300 billion to fund checks amounting to $3,400 per family of four, going to approximately 90 percent of the US population.
- $250 billion mainly for the $600 per week unemployment insurance benefit on top of normal state program benefits averaging $355 per week.
- $150 billion in walking-around money for state, local, and tribal governments.
- $140 billion for a sweeping, open-ended array of public health programs.
- Tens of billions more in special interest pork of every kind, shape, and purpose.
Not surprisingly, The Donald did not hesitate to take credit for this grotesque act of fiscal malfeasance:
We are marshalling the full power of government and society to achieve victory over the virus. Together, we will endure, we will prevail, and we will WIN! #CARESAct
Signing Ceremony for The Most Grotesque Act of Fiscal Malfeasance in American History.
The budgetary outcomes were truly astounding-especially when the second Covid Relief bill signed by The Donald in Dec- ember 2020 and its extension and companion, Biden's American Rescue Act enacted in March 2021, are added to the total. In all, Washington enacted $6.5 trillion of Covid-relief measures in barely 365 days. This figure was nearly 50 percent larger than the entire federal budget-defense, social security, education, Medicare/ Medicaid, interest and all the rest-in the pre-Covid year of 2019.
That's right. Trump ignited a grotesque outbreak of fiscal recklessness far worse than anything GOP orators had inveighed against since the time of FDR. And much of this spending erup- tion was recorded in the government data series for personal transfer payments. The latter is posted monthly and at annualized rates, thereby capturing in real time the impact of Trump's fiscal cyclone ripping through the US economy.
The annualized run rate of government transfer payments, including the state and local supplemental portions, posted at a normal level of $3.15 trillion in February 2020. So that's the pre- Covid baseline. But after the sight-unseen $2.2 trillion CARES act was enthusiastically signed into law by The Donald in late March, it erupted to a $6.42 trillion annualized rate in April.
Thereafter a second wave surged the transfer payment rate to $5.682 trillion in January 2021 when the second relief act was signed by The Donald in December, followed by a final burst at an annualized rate to $8.098 trillion in March 2021 owing to Biden's American Rescue Act.
But even in the case of the latter, the driving force was completion of the $2,000 per person stimmy that The Donald had advocated in the run-up to the election, which had been only partially funded in the December legislation. And this stimmy completion came along with extension of unemployment toppers and other expenditures that had been originated in the two earlier Trump-signed measures.
This was the very worst kind of government spending explo- sion imaginable. That's because transfer payments are inherently inflationary poison when they are funded by new government debt which, in turn, is monetized (purchased) by the Fed, as these clearly were. This kind of regime of spend, borrow, and print pow- erfully gooses demand without adding an iota to supply.
Ironically, therefore, Trump-O-Nomics was the epitome of anti-supply side. It was a stark repudiation of the theory of Reaganomics, and far, far worse in its practical impact on federal spending and deficits than the accidental ballooning of the public debt on the Gipper's watch.
None of this fiscal madness, of course, would have been even remotely plausible without the utterly unnecessary lockdowns. Even then, however, no real Republican would have signed legis- lation authorizing such massive transfer payments if they were to be funded exclusively with borrowing and money-printing.
The Donald did so, of course, and there is no mystery as to why. Trump has no fiscal policy compass at all. So, it was a good way to quiet what otherwise would have been a fatal political uprising against the public health martial law that his administration had imposed during an election year.
That's the real irony of the story. When it comes to the core matter of fiscal discipline, The Donald was no disrupter at all. He was actually the worst of the lot among the last half-century of Washington spenders, and by a long shot, too.
Annualized Rate of Government Transfer Payments, 2017 to 2021.
For avoidance of doubt, here is a longer-term perspective, reflect- ing the year-over-year rate of change in government transfer pay- ments going back to 1970. That was shortly after the Great Society legislation had kicked off today's $4 trillion per year flood of transfers.
To appreciate the veritable fiscal shock that issued from The Donald's pen, it needs be noted that in the last quarter of 2019 the Y/Y gain in government transfer payment spending was about $150 billion, which was consistent with the longer-term trend.
However, by Q1 2021 that Y/Y gain had soared to $4.9 trillion. Again, that was the delta, not the absolute level. That is to say, the year-over-year gain from The Donald's Covid Relief Bacchanalia was 33x larger than the pre-Covid norm!
And, no, you can't blame this inflationary time-bomb solely on Biden as the MAGA partisans insist, although Biden would surely have signed the two early COVID-bailout measures had he been in The Donald's shoes during 2020.
But that's just the point-The Donald is a paid-up member of the Washington uniparty when it comes to government spending. All of the hideous excesses of the Covid bailouts were launched on his watch, signed into law with his pen, and/or legitimized with the imprimatur of an ostensible Republican president. The American Rescue Act was just the final installment of Trump's unhinged Covid spend-a-thon.
After all, the overwhelming share of the $6.5 trillion of Covid spending consisted of $2,000+ stimmy checks to 90 percent of the public, the $600 per week unemployment toppers, the mas- sive Payroll Protection Program (PPP) giveaways, and the flood of money into the health, education, local government, and non- profit sectors. Every one of these items was blessed by The Donald twice before Sleepy Joe reclaimed these measures as the Dem big spenders' apostasies that they actually were.
Needless to say, the Covid bailouts were not The Donald's only fiscal sin. When you compare the constant dollar growth rate of total federal spending during his four years in the Oval Office with that of his recent predecessors, it is evident that The Donald was in a big spender's league all of his own.
Trump Shoots the Moon: Y/Y Change in Government Transfer Payments, 1970-2021.
In constant 2021 dollars, for instance, the federal budget grew by $366 billion per annum on The Donald's watch, a level qua- druple the big spending years of Barack Obama, and nearly 11x higher than during the 1993-2000 period under Bill Clinton.
Federal Spending: Constant 2021 Dollar Increase Per Year:
- Trump, 2017-2020: +$366 billion per annum.
- Obama, 2009-2016: +$86 billion per annum.
- George Bush the Younger, 2001-2008: +$136 billion per annum.
- Bill Clinton, 1993-2000: +$34 billion per annum.
- George Bush the Elder, 1989-1992: +$97 billion per annum.
- Ronald Reagan, 1981-1988: +$64 billion per annum.
- Jimmy Carter, 1977-1980: +$62 billion per annum.
The same story holds for the annual growth rate of inflation-ad- justed federal spending. At 6.92 percent per annum during Trump's sojourn in the Oval Office it was 2x to 4x higher than under all of his recent predecessors.
At the end of the day, the historical litmus test of GOP eco- nomic policy was restraint on government spending growth, and therefore curtailment of the relentless expansion of the Leviathan- on-the-Potomac. But when it comes to that standard, The Donald's record stands first among no equals on the wall of shame.
Federal Spending: Annual Real Growth Rate:
- Trump, 2016-2020: 6.92 percent.
- Obama, 2008-2016: 1.96 percent.
- George Bush the Younger: 3.95 percent.
- Bill Clinton, 1992-2000: 1.19 percent.
- George Bush the Elder: 3.90 percent.
- Ronald Reagan, 1980-1988: 3.15 percent.
- Jimmy Carter, 1976-1980: 3.72 percent.
Likewise, when it comes to ballooning federal deficits and public debt, Donald Trump earned his sobriquet as the King of Debt and then some. Relative to the nation's economic base, the average of The Donald's four deficits at 9.0 percent of GDP was literally off- the-charts of modern presidential history.
Average Surplus/Deficit as Percent of GDP Under Post-War
Presidents (fiscal years):
- Truman (1947-1953): +0.73 percent.
- Eisenhower (1954-1961): -0.37 percent.
- Kennedy-Johnson (1962-1969): -0.88 percent.
- Nixon-Ford (1970-1977): -.2.38 percent.
- Carter (1978-1981): -2.33 percent.
- Reagan-Bush (1982-1993): -4.13 percent.
- Clinton (1994-2001): -0.13 percent.
- George W. Bush (2002-2009): -3.31 percent.
- Obama (2010-2017): -4.98 percent.
- Trump (2018-2021): -9.00 percent.
Similarly, in inflation-adjusted terms (constant 2021 dollars), The Donald's $2.04 trillion per annum add-on to the public debt amounted to double the fiscal profligacy of the Obama years, and orders of magnitude more than the debt additions of earlier occu- pants of the Oval Office.
Constant 2021 Dollar Additions to the Public Debt per Annum:
- Donald Trump: $2.043 trillion.
- Barack Obama: $1.061 trillion.
- George W. Bush: $0.694 trillion.
- Bill Clinton: $0.168 trillion.
- George H. W. Bush: $0.609 trillion.
- Ronald Reagan: $0.384 trillion.
- Jimmy Carter: $0.096 trillion.
Indeed, in the long sweep of things, the real damage was done in the Covid/Lockdowns/Stimmies year of 2020. Federal spending erupted by nearly $2 trillion during that year alone and soared from 22.3 percent of GDP in 2019 to nearly 32 percent of GDP in 2020. And when state and local outlays are included, The Donald managed to bring government spending in the US to a European social democracy-style 40 percent of GDP.
It might be well and truly asked: With charts like the one below, who needs Republicans of the ilk represented by Donald Trump?
Federal Spending Share of GDP, 2000 to 2021.
There is no secret as to how spending and debt soared like never before during Trump's time in the Oval Office. Trump wanted to wield the biggest defense stick on the planet on the primitive theory that he could bluster his way to foreign policy success just like he claims to have done with the trade unions and subcontractors in New York City.
But to get his big defense stick, he had to accommodate the Congressional porkers on nondefense discretionary spending and leave entitlements untouched. And that he was happy to do because Trump just didn't care about federal spending.
Thus, when big-spending Barack Obama left the White House the national security budget properly measured totaled a stagger- ing $822 billion. That included $600 billion for the Pentagon, $46 billion for security assistance and international operations and
$177 billion for veterans' compensation and services, which reflect the deferred cost of prior wars.
So much for the "peace candidate" of 2008 and the anti-war democratic party of the Vietnam era and its aftermath. To the con- trary, Obama's $822 billion national security budget embodied the cost of global hegemony and the Forever Wars to which it gave rise-notwithstanding that the only real threat to homeland secu- rity in the post-war period, the former Soviet Union, had been consigned to the dustbin of history twenty-five years earlier.
Donald Trump came bounding into the Oval Office talking what sounded like a different game-America First. But as his last Attorney General, Bill Barr, recently noted, even if you believe in his policies don't expect him to execute them. His four years in the White House proved he can't organize or lead his way out of a wet paper bag, and his budgetary fiasco in the national security space provides striking confirmation of Barr's observation.
To be sure, Trump did manage to see through the uniparty's demonization of Putin, and the feckless neocon claim that he seeks to recreate the former Soviet Empire. After all, in Washington's theater of the absurd Vlad Putin was simply The Donald's doppel- ganger when it came to demonization and putting on the beltway hate. So, Trump got that part of the equation right.
But Trump actually had no idea what he meant by "America First" except that the line elicited boisterous cheers from the patri- otic throngs at his campaign rallies. The fact is, he was histori- cally ignorant beyond measure; lazy as they come when it involves studying your brief; and a total sucker for military pomp and cir- cumstance and the medal-bedecked uniforms of the generals.
So while Trump talked about bringing the Empire home, he actually fueled its budget like never before. The vastly bloated national security budget left behind by Obama took on $215 bil- lion more girth on The Donald's watch. His outgoing broadly measured national security budget (FY 2021) actually broke the trillion-dollar barrier, weighing in at $1.035 trillion, or 26 percent more than what Obama and the Congressional uniparty had frit- tered away in FY 2017.
In short, The Donald was so ill-informed and confused that he ended up with a national security budget which amounted to the Military-Industrial Complex first, not one designed strictly for the defense of the homeland-better termed Fortress America, which was advocated in the early post-war era by Mr. Republican, Senator Robert Taft of Ohio. The latter's views were the very opposite of today's global hegemony views of the neocons who dominate the GOP ranks on the military and foreign affairs committees on Capitol Hill.
Indeed, the truth of the matter is that the present-day GOP was hijacked a few decades ago by a loathsome tribe of born-again Trotskyite statist, who discovered that a perpetual condition of global war was the true passageway to state power and political self-aggrandizement in the Imperial City.
That is more than evident when you compare Trump's result- ing trillion-dollar national security budget with the maximum
$500 billion spending level that would be needed to fully fund Fortress America. The staggering $500 billion per year difference makes it starkly evident that even on the Pentagon side of the Potomac, The Donald was a thorough-going patsy for the Swamp creatures.
In the first place, a Fortress America-based implementation of The Donald's vague notions about bringing the forces home rests on the truth that in the present world order there are no tech- nologically-advanced industrial powers who have either the capa- bility or intention to attack the American homeland. To do that you need a massive land armada, huge air and sealift capacities, a Navy and Air Force many times the size of current US forces and humongous supply lines and logistics capacities that have never been even dreamed of by any other nation on the planet.
You also need an initial GDP of say $50 trillion per year to sustain what would be the most violent conflagration of weap- onry and material in human history. And that's to say nothing of needing to be ruled by suicidal leaders willing to risk the nuclear destruction of their own countries, allies, and economic commerce in order to accomplish, what? Occupy Denver?
So the entire idea that there is a post-Cold War existential threat to America's security is just plain bogus because, obviously, no alleged foe has the requisite GDP or military heft. Russia's GDP is a scant $1.8 trillion, not the $50 trillion that would be needed for it to put an invasionary force on the New Jersey shores. And its pre-Ukraine defense budget was just $75 billion, which amounts to about four weeks of waste in Washington's trillion-dollar monster.
As for China, let us not forget that even its communist rul- ers sill believe it is the "Middle Kingdom" and therefore that it already occupies the most important territory on the entire planet. So why would Beijing's rulers want to occupy Cleveland OH or Birmingham AL to either extract high-cost production or root out dissenters from Chairman Xi's thought?
More importantly, China doesn't have the GDP heft to even think about landing on the California shores, notwithstanding Wall Street's endless kowtowing to the China Boom. The fact is, China has accumulated in excess of $50 trillion of debt in barely two decades!
Therefore, it didn't grow organically in the historic capitalist mode; it printed, borrowed, spent, and built like there was no tomorrow. But the resulting façade of prosperity would not last six months if China's $3.6 trillion global export market-the source of the hard cash that keeps its Ponzi upright-were to crash, which is exactly what would happen if it tried to invade America.
To be sure, its totalitarian leaders are immensely misguided and downright evil from the perspective of their oppressed pop- ulation. But they are not stupid. They stay in power by keeping the people relatively fat and happy and would never risk bringing down what amounts to an economic house of cards.
And the nuclear blackmail card can't be played by either of these foes, either. According to a recent CBO analysis, the annual cost of maintaining and investing America's triad nuclear deter- rent-submarine-launched ICBMs, land-based ICBMs, and the strategic nuclear bomber fleet-is just $52 billion per year, or less than 6 percent of the pentagon's current budget and barely 4 per- cent of overall national security spending.
That triad deterrent is what dissuades both Moscow and Beijing from attempting nuclear blackmail and therefore invasion by nuclear checkmate. That is to say, the lynchpin of America's security lies in the arrangement known as MAD (mutual assured destruction), a mechanism that has worked for seventy years. And it worked even at the peak of the Cold War when the Soviet Union had forty thousand nuclear warheads and leaders far more unsta- ble than either Cool-Hand Vlad or Xi Jinping.
At the end of the day, it is the great ocean moats, the triad nuclear deterrent, and the relative economic diminutiveness of Russia and China that keep the American homeland secure and safe from hostile foreign encroachment. Most of the rest of the massive pentagon budget is based on false predicates, fabricated threats, and the budget-grabbing prowess of its own marketing (i.e., think tanks) and lobbying (i.e., defense contractors) arms.
In this context, Trump did ask the right question, even if he never came up with an actionable answer. Namely, why in the world do we still have costly, obsolete arrangements like NATO thirty-two years after the Soviet Union perished?
The only real answer is that it is a mechanism to sell arms to its thirty-one-member states. Indeed, Europe had long ago proved it did not really fear that Putin would be marching his armies through the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. That's why Germany pre- viously spent only 1.3 percent of GDP on defense and was more than happy to buy cheap energy via Russian delivered pipeline gas.
Germany's current quasi-warlike posture vis-a-vis Russia doesn't gainsay that history, either. The truth is, the German Green Party-which is what keeps the Scholz social democrat govern- ment in power-has gone full-on warmongering for the hideous reason that the Greens live to end the era of fossil fuel. So, what better way to do it than cut off the cheap oil and gas supplies from Russia on which Germany's fossil-fueled economy is based and then blame it on a demonized Putin?
Moreover, even a passing familiarity with European history reminds you that Russians and Poles hate each other and have done so over centuries of wars and bloody altercations. So Vlad Putin may not be a Russian Gandhi, but he is sure as hell way too smart to attempt to occupy Poland. Ditto France, Germany, the Low Countries, Italy, Iberia, and the rest.
In short, Washington doesn't need NATO to protect our allies in Europe because they are not facing any threat that can't be handled by their own ways and means, preferably of the diplomatic variety. In fact, the whole disaster in Ukraine today is rooted in the War Party's mindless expansion of NATO in violation of all of Washington's promises to Gorbachev to not expand an inch to the east in return for the unification of Germany. Yet the double-cross has been so extensive that NATO now includes every one of the old Warsaw Pact nations and has even attempted to extend its reach to two of the former Soviet Republics (i.e., Georgia and Ukraine).
The same holds for Washington's so-called "allies" in East Asia and the massive US military resources committed to the region. The truth is, functioning as the gendarme of the planet is the only possible justification for the extra $500 billion per year cost of the current national security budget.
For example, why does the US still deploy 100,000 US forces and their dependents in Japan and Okinawa and 29,000 in South Korea?
These two counties have a combined GDP of nearly $7 tril- lion-or 235x more than North Korea, and they are light-years ahead of the latter in technology and military capability. Also, they don't go around the world engaging in regime change, thereby spooking fear on the north side of the DMZ.
Accordingly, Japan and South Korea could more than provide for their own national security in a manner they see fit without any help whatsoever from Imperial Washington. That's especially the case because absent the massive US military threat in the region, North Korea would surely seek a rapprochement and economic help from its neighbors, including China.
Indeed, sixty-five years after the unnecessary war in Korea ended, there is only one reason why the Kim family is still in power in Pyongyang and why periodically they have nois- ily brandished their incipient nuclear weapons and missiles. Mainly, it's because Washington still occupies the Korean peninsula and surrounds its waters with more lethal firepower than was brought to bear against the industrial might of Nazi Germany during the whole of WWII.
Of course, these massive and costly forces are also justified on the grounds of supporting Washington's commitments to the defense of Taiwan. But that commitment has always been obso- lete and unnecessary to America's homeland security.
As it happened, Chiang Kia-Shek lost the Chinese civil war fair and square in 1949, and there was no reason to perpetuate his rag-tag regime when it retreated to the last square miles of Chinese territory-the island province of Taiwan. The latter had been under control of the Chinese Qing Dynasty for two hundred years thru 1895, and after Imperial Japan was expelled from the island in 1945, Taiwan was once again "Chinese."
So today it is separated from the mainland only because Washington arbitrarily made it a protectorate and "ally" when the loser of the Chinese civil war set up shop in a small remnant of China's modern geography, thereby establishing an artificial nation that had no bearing whatsoever on America's homeland security, and in subsequent decades accomplished nothing except bolster the case for a big Navy and for US policing of the Pacific region for no good reason of homeland defense.
That is to say, without Washington's support for the nationalist regime in Taipei, the island would have been long ago absorbed back into the Chinese polity where it had been for centuries. Even now, the Taiwanese would surely prefer peaceful prosperity as the 24th province of China rather than a catastrophic war against Beijing that they would have no hope of surviving.
By the same token, the alternative-US military intervention- would mean WWIII. The only sensible policy, therefore, is for Washington to recant seventy years of folly brought on by the China Lobby and arms manufacturers and green-light a Taiwanese reconciliation with the mainland. Even a few years thereafter, Wall Street bankers peddling M&A deals in Taipei wouldn't know the difference from Shanghai.
In short, there is no need whatsoever for America's massive conventional armada and what is now (FY 2024) its $1.3 trillion annual national security expense. That's the true implication of America First, but The Donald didn't have a clue about its bearing on the actual national security budget.
To the contrary, his support for the massive increases in Pentagon spending was based on the primitive theory that the route to a successful foreign policy was, well, himself!
That is to say, national security would come from a big mili- tary stick in his stubby small hands and a lot of eyeball-to-eyeball sit-downs between The Donald and the other ostensible bad guys of the world. But that was sheer nonsense, of course. Implied mil- itary threats and dickering at a one-on-one summit of the type Trump had with Vlad Putin, Kim Jong Un, and Xi Jinping were mainly just theater-a global version of The Apprentice. What ulti- mately keeps America safe, however, is its nuclear deterrent. As long as that is intact and effective, there is no conceivable form of nuclear blackmail that could be used to jeopardize the security and liberty of the homeland.
Yet according to the aforementioned CBO study the current annual cost of the strategic deterrent of just $52 billion includes $13 billion for the ballistic missile submarine force, $7 billion for the land-based ICBMs, and $6 billion for the strategic bomber force. On top of that there is also $13 billion to maintain the nuclear weapons stockpiles, infrastructure, and supporting services and
$11 billion for strategic nuclear command and control, communi- cations, and early warnings systems.
In all, and after allowing for normal inflation and weapons development costs, CBO's ten-year estimate for the strategic nuclear deterrent is just $756 billion. That happens to be only 7.0 percent of the $10 trillion baseline for the total cost of defense proper over the next decade and only 5.0 percent of the $15 tril- lion national security baseline when you include international operations and veterans.
The adoption of a Fortress America national security budget of $500 billion per year over the next decade would save in excess of $5 trillion. And that would surely be more than doable from the $14 trillion CBO baseline for total national security spending excluding the strategic forces.
Under a Fortress America defense strategy, there would be no need for eleven carrier battle groups including their air-wings, escort and support ships, and supporting infrastructure. Those forces are sitting ducks in this day and age anyway but are only necessary for force projection abroad and wars of invasion and occupation. The American coastline and interior, by contrast, can be protected by land-based air.
According to another CBO study, the ten-year baseline cost for the Navy's unnecessary eleven carrier battle groups will approach $1 trillion alone. Likewise, the land forces of the US Army will cost $2 trillion, and that's again mainly for the purpose of force projec- tion abroad.
As Senator Taft and his original Fortress America supporters long ago recognized, overwhelming air superiority over the North American continent is what is actually necessary for homeland security. But even that would require only a small part of the cur- rent $1.5 trillion ten-year cost of US Air Force operations, which are heavily driven by global force projection capacities.
At the end of the day, if The Donald had really been commit- ted to an America First foreign policy, he would have done his homework, taken on the national security Swamp Creatures, and put in place a Fortress America budget that could save $5 trillion over the next decade. And from there could have begun the pro- cess of putting Washington a sustainable fiscal path.
Then again, when has The Donald ever done his homework, got in real bruising political battles over substantive policy matters rather than tweetstorms, and cared a whit about the nation's fiscal solvency?
How The Donald Threw In the Towel on Domestic
Spending
Finally, there is one more element gravitating toward fiscal catastrophe that got a real boost under Trump-O-Nomics. The truth is, the GOP has been thoroughly Trumpified and distracted from its main fiscal mission by The Donald's utterly misguided war on the US borders and demagogic anti-immigrant howling and by his parallel eagerness to embrace big tax cuts without pay- ing for them (see Chapter 6).
Moreover, with The Donald's loud insistence, the contem- porary GOP has even taken a powder completely on Medicare, Social Security, and the lesser entitlements. That's $50 tril- lion of current law spending over the next decade, and yet the GOP recently agreed with Joe Biden and the Dems to cut nary a penny from these monster programs in the last debt ceiling settlement.
But no sooner did they brush themselves off from their shame- ful surrender on the debt ceiling deal than they were at it again. This time proposing huge tax cuts with no off-setting spending reductions, and again with The Donald's fulsome support.
In total, the recently tabled House GOP tax package encom- passed $240 billion of tax cuts such as increasing the standard deduction on income taxes, expanding opportunity zones, roll- ing back some requirements for reporting transactions to the IRS, and restoring expired Trump-era business expense write-offs.
Thus, under the new GOP tax plan, the standard deduction for singles would increase by $2,000 to $15,850, and for married cou- ples the standard deduction would increase by $4,000 to $30,700. Accordingly, the chief GOP sponsor proclaimed that the day of the proverbial free lunch has truly arrived:
"With this provision in place, an American family of four will not pay a cent in federal taxes on their first $68,000 of income," said House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith, Missouri Republican.
And if dogs could whistle, the world would be a chorus! That is to say, has Rep. Smith done the math? Roughly 75 percent of all US workers earn less than $68,000 and yet Republicans are going to exempt them from paying any federal income taxes at all, even as the Washington behemoth is allowed to keep on spending and borrowing like there is no tomorrow?
Of course, there will be a tomorrow, albeit a fiscally disastrous one for which the Trumpified GOP can share fully in the blame. It is supposed to be the party that keeps Washington on the fiscal straight and narrow, but under The Donald's feckless MAGA slo- gans it has degenerated into the party of gluttonous war spend- ing, unpaid-for tax cuts, and entitlements cowardice.
Once upon a time there was a majority of Republicans led by Senator Robert Taft who believed in fiscal rectitude and small government-and on both sides of the Potomac River. As we have indicated, Taft advocated Fortress America, not global hegemony, as the route to homeland security. His view was right then, and it is still correct now. So the truth is, Donald Trump is the anti-Taft. He's no Mr. Republican at all-just a dangerous poseur.
For avoidance of doubt, just consider what he embraced in order to get his extra national security spending. It might have been supposed, of course, that with control of the veto pen and strong GOP positions in both the House and Senate during these four years that the near quarter-trillion dollars per year of extra largesse for the national security state would have been off-set by some hefty curtailments on the domestic side. The party in power being the fiscally conservative GOP and all.
But not a chance. The nondefense budget of $3.38 trillion left by Obama (FY 2017) weighed in at $6.07 trillion when The Donald finally shuffled out of the Oval Office in FY 2021.
That $2.69 trillion nondefense spending increase amounted to a 79 percent gain over the four-year period, averaging nearly $675 billion per year. Big spender Obama, by contrast, had increased the non-defense budget by an average of just $112 billion per year and Bill Clinton's per annum nondefense increase figure was but
$85 billion.
Nor can you blame The Donald's domestic spending bonanza entirely on entitlements and interest payments, even though legis- lative curtailment of these mandatory spending accounts is exactly the job of the GOP in our two-party democracy. As it happened, however, The Donald also presided over a veritable eruption of spending for the third component of nondefense spending- appropriated domestic programs.
That's right. We are talking about the very corner of the bud- get where the presidential veto pen is potentially mightier than the beltway's assembled army of PACs and lobbies or the over- flowing pork barrels of hometown goodies. But in round terms, nondefense discretionary spending rose from $600 billion per year to $900 billion during The Donald's four budgets. That's a 50 per- cent gain, yet there was nary a veto to be hurtled at the appropri- ations bills and eleventh-hour omnibus spending extravaganzas that came across The Donald's desk.
But here's the thing. Donald Trump has never made any bones about his complete disinterest in curtailing government spending and borrowing. Still, he did not accomplish these monster spend- ing increases by unilaterally defying the will of the GOP congres- sional delegations, either. These hideous spending and borrowing eruptions represented, instead, the overwhelming consensus of the bipartisan uniparty.
The majority of both parties devoutly desire to feed the Warfare State monster ever greater rations, even as they give a perennial hall pass to entitlement spending and jump at every possible chance, such as the trillions of Covid Lockdown relief spending and the green energy tax credit scams, to open the fiscal spigot wider.
Alas, that gets us to the dirty secret of the nation's now $33 trillion public debt. Mainly that the once and former conservative anti-spending party has been taken over by the MAGA hat "cul- ture warriors" and the neocon warmongers, but most especially by a permanent class of Washington Republican legislators and staff who live for the power and pelf that manning-up the Empire bestows upon them.
Serving on the broad array of national security committees, grazing at the foreign affairs think tanks and NGOs, junketing far and wide across the planet as latter-day pro-consuls, visiting the dozens of occupied countries, and inspecting America's eight hun- dred military bases-all are far more thrilling than returning to Green Bay to run a car dealership.
So they feed the Empire, and the Empire nourishes their sojourns on the great stage of world affairs. That's the heart of the real Washington Swamp. And the clueless Donald Trump fed it like never before.
The Poison of Relentless Public Borrowing
Ultimately, excessive, relentless public borrowing is the poison that will kill capitalist prosperity and displace limited constitu- tional government with unchained statist encroachment on the liberties of the people. For that reason alone, The Donald needs be locked-out of the nomination and banished from the Oval Office.
Of course, the great enabler of The Donald's reckless fiscal escapades was the Federal Reserve, which increased its balance sheet by nearly $3 trillion or 66 percent during The Donald's four-year term. That amounted to balance sheet expansion (i.e., money-printing) equal to $750 billion per annum-compared to gains of $300 billion and $150 billion per annum during the Barack Obama and George W. Bush tenures, respectively.
Still, Trump wasn't satisfied with this insane level of mone- tary expansion. He never did stop hectoring the Fed for being too stingy with the printing press and for keeping interest rates higher than the King of Debt in his wisdom deemed to be the correct level.
Balance Sheet of the Federal Reserve, 1960 to 2020.
In short, given the economic circumstances during his tenure and the unprecedented stimulus emanating from the Keynesian Fed, Donald Trump's constant demands for still easier money made even Richard Nixon look like a paragon of financial sobri- ety. The truth is, no US president has ever been as reckless on monetary matters as Donald Trump. That's why it's especially rich that the die-hard MAGA fans are now gumming loudly for a revival of the great Trump economy. Yet it is the egregious fiscal, monetary, and Lockdown excesses during his tenure that gave rise to the current economic mess.
Then again, the MAGA faithful have been thoroughly Trumpified. After years of The Donald insisting that even more fiat money should be pumped into the economy, the GOP politicians gave the Fed a free pass during the 2022 campaign-and did so during an inflation-besotted election season that was tailor-made for a hammer-and-tongs attack on the inflationary money-printers domiciled in the Eccles Building.
Once upon a time, GOP politicians knew better. Certainly, Ronald Reagan did amidst the double-digit inflation of the early 1980s.
The Gipper did not hesitate to say that Big Government, deficit-spending and monetary profligacy were the cause of the nation's economic ills. He was right, and he won the election in a landslide. Indeed, he was even persuaded to include a gold stan- dard plank in the 1980 GOP platform.
By contrast, consult the videos or transcripts of a score or two or three of MAGA rallies. Did anything remotely resembling the Reagenesque take on inflation ever flow from The Donald's bom- bastic vocal = cords?
Of course not. So to repeat: Donald Trump is not an economic conservative in any way, shape, or form. He's simply a self- promoting demagogue who, during four years in the Oval Office, only managed to compound the nation's ills stemming from bad policy ideas deeply embedded inside the Washington beltway.
Lead among these is runaway federal spending, borrowing, and printing-a terrible policy malfeasance that Donald Trump pushed into a League All of His Own.