We Are Not Surprised

There's more than one way to fill a bathtub. 

It'll get filled if all you do is leave it out the rain for a good while.

What you don't do is open the drain and turn off the taps - are you that fuckin' stoopid?

The Hill:

The federal deficit in the first seven months of fiscal 2019 jumped 38 percent compared to the same period last year, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said Tuesday.

The deficit ballooned to $531 billion from the beginning of October to the end of April, well above the previous year's $385 billion mark.
But the comparison with 2018 was somewhat inflated, CBO said, due to differences in payments and outlays; without them, the deficit would have been $486 billion.

Expenditures rose by $178 billion during the first seven months of the fiscal year, driven by both increased mandatory spending and a bipartisan agreement to increase discretionary spending. Higher interest rates also contributed.

“Outlays for net interest on the public debt increased by $27 billion (or 13 percent) because interest rates on short-term debt are substantially higher now than they were during the same period in 2018 and because the amount of federal debt is larger than it was a year ago," the CBO said in its report.

Meanwhile, revenues were up only $34 billion, due in part to the 2017 GOP tax law.

“Most of that shortfall stems from lower-than-anticipated withholding of individual income and payroll taxes in December 2018 and January 2019,” CBO said.

A recent CBO analysis found that if current spending and tax policies remain in place, the nation’s debt burden will reach 105 percent of gross domestic product by 2029, just 1 percentage point below the post-World War II record set in 1946.

The KrugMan Speaks

If you read just one post today, let it be this one by Paul Krugman at NYT:

So the story isn’t “irresponsible politicians will always squander the good years”; it is “conservative Republican politicians run up debt even in good years, because they want to force cuts in social programs.” Kind of a different story, isn’t it?

The point, then, is that the seemingly worldly-wise cynicism that seems to be the last defense against the economically obvious is in fact based on an imaginary history that looks nothing like what actually happened.

The Krugman

I don't like feeling I'm becoming kinda captured by a slanted narrative (just sayin' that one straight out), but I'll try to contain my discomfort (for a while anyway) because Paul Krugman seems always to be trying to talk some sense into us.

And he keeps coming up with real info about real events that we need to weigh against all the fantastic predictions of doom coming from the Austerity Freaks.

But what about the brief but nasty slump in 1927? That wasn’t caused by spiking interest rates; it was, instead, caused by fiscal austerity, by the measures taken to stabilize the franc.

So even when we look at the closest thing I can find to the scenario the deficit scolds want us to fear, it doesn’t play out at all as described.

It’s quite remarkable: our policy discourse remains largely dominated by fears of an event that the fear-mongers can’t explain in theory, and for which they can offer no historical examples in practice.

Raw Data

Here's a look at Paul Ryan's budget proposal via Bipartisan Policy Center.

How Paul Ryan's budget plan compares to that of President Obama and BPC's Debt Reduction Task Force

By Loren Adler and Shai Akabas

Below is the Bipartisan Policy Center’s (BPC) summary of House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s fiscal year (FY) 2013 budget. All of the information about the budget proposal is taken directly from either The Path to Prosperity: A Blueprint for American Renewal or the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) Long-Term Budgetary Impact of Paths for Federal Revenues and Spending Specified by Chairman Ryan.

We hope that this comprehensive summary will further clarify the entirety of his plan, and compare it in some key respects to that of President Barack Obama and the plans proposed by the bipartisan fiscal commissions (BPC’s Domenici-Rivlin and Bowles-Simpson).

I still maintain that Ryan is a phony.  Even tho' there are some things he has to say about our fiscal mess that line up with my own views, they are all at the surface.  Once you dig into what Ryan's actually proposing, it's really just more of the same snake oil the GOP's been peddling for 35 years.  Not even guys like David Stockman and Bruce Bartlett are willing to go along with the kind of crap the Ryanites are trying to sell us.

From Bruce Bartlett

One of the guys who kinda invented Reaganomics, Bartlett's been trying to pull the conservatives back from the brink. 

Read the article here.
Quote: "Revenues would be even lower if Republicans had gotten their wish and the stimulus consisted entirely of tax cuts. How tax cuts would help people with no wages because they have no jobs or businesses with no profits to tax was never explained. But many right-wingers are convinced that tax cuts are the only appropriate governmental response no matter what the problem is."

Read more of Bartlett's Stuff.