Whether it’s deporting college students, decimating federal agencies, Signal gate, threatening Greenland, or suggesting that gorging on Vitamin A will stop the surge of measles, you have to wonder what is the administration attempting to do? Are there plans that make rational sense, or what is all this distraction and obfuscation about? What concerns me is the tax plan that House Republicans included in last week’s budget negotiation but yet there is not much discussion in the news. The president wants to make his first term tax cut of $4 trillion permanent, and Congress seems to want to go along, but the fiscal heft is not only frightening but dangerous. We could be walking into our own self-inflicted Brexit as the New York Times recently suggested.
Standing in the corner is The Deficit, which very few in power want to even glance at, much less lock eyes with, but it refuses to be ignored. The deficit in 2024 was $1.8 trillion, and it is now part of the national debt, which clocks in at $29 trillion. Our debt now stands at 98% of our Gross Domestic Product. The interest on the payment of that debt is not yet crippling but it’s getting close as we continue to spend at projected levels. Right now, interest payments on our borrowing equals $2 trillion, which makes it the second largest item in the federal budget after social security. So debt payments now surpass defense, Medicaid and Medicare, and those two entitlements just continue to increase in cost.
President Trump seems unfazed by those figures, and he continues to reassure a confused public that everything will be alright and Elon Musk will find enough waste, fraud, and abuse (is that phrase copyrighted?) to pay for the tax cut. Even if the president seems nonplussed, the world at large is keeping notice. We have been fortunate over the last 25 years that other countries continue to buy our bonds and to keep the American dollar as the favored currency, but that could be ending due to the current tariff chaos. Last week the greenback fell in value and US treasure bonds have jumped to 4.5 %. These are red flags. “The whole world has decided that the US has no idea what it’s doing” writes Mark Blyth, a professor of economics at Brown University. Last week’s tariff whiplash did nothing to reassure the planet.
For the latest news on everything happening in Chester County and the surrounding area, be sure to follow MyChesCo on Google News and MSN.