Borrowing from the Grandkids

By Hank Silverberg

$984 billion. 

That's almost a TRILLION dollars and it's the federal deficit for fiscal 2019 alone. It’s the highest yearly deficit in seven years and $205 billion more than 2018.  It does not bode well for the future. 

Thanks to the Trump tax cut, defense spending and interest payments on the shortfall, it’s the widest gap between revenue collected by the federal government and federal government spending in almost a decade.

It’s the first time ever that the deficit has skyrocketed at the same time unemployment is low, revenue from corporate taxes, trade and personal income are up and the economy is relatively good.

During the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump said he would eliminate the federal deficit within eight years. Instead, the man who bankrupted six of his own companies over the years and owes money to scores of vendors and workers he's never paid, has taken it the other way. 

https://www.thoughtco.com/donald-trump-business-bankruptcies-4152019 Yearly deficits have doubled under President Trump, who has endorsed big spending increases with the help of the Republicans in Congress. The GOP has abandoned its decades-old push to balance the federal budget. To put things in perspective, interest on federal borrowing was $380 billion, about the same as the government spends on the entire Medicaid program.  

Most of us are not economists. But if you balance the family budget you know eventually you are going to have to reduce spending and pay off the debt. The full federal deficit is over $22 trillion. 

Here’s the most frightening part of it all. NOTHING is being done to fix it. And some of the budget cuts that have been proposed for fiscal 2020 are unpalatable—cuts in Medicare, Social Security and education spending, to name a few. 

Part of the time I was writing this week’s blog, my two-year-old grandchild was playing at my feet. I apologized to him. He’s going to get stuck with this bill.

The deficit can also be blamed on Congress. The partisanship has pretty much paralyzed both the House and the Senate, and there has been a warning that another government shutdown like last year is possible at Thanksgiving time.  
https://www.govexec.com/management/2019/10/congress-appears-headed-another-stopgap-spending-bill-avoid-shutdown/160878/

My grandson is also growing up in a less secure world. Evidence on that comes from the resignation of White House Cyber Security Chief Dimitrios Vistakis. Axios obtained a memo in which Vistakis describes a Trump administration bent on purging all Obama-era security specialists from the White House, with the cyber-security office a particular target.  His memo says the Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Science and Technology Council have been turned into “ghost towns.”

The implications for foreign policy and potential cyber attacks by unfriendly governments like China and Iran could be devastating not just now, but in the future, long after Trump is gone.


News Notes:

There was one really good piece of news this week. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is dead. The leader of ISIS was tracked down in northwest Syria. The United States sent in Delta Force, and Baghdadi apparently blew himself up along with his children when U.S. troops cornered him in a cave.

www.pscp.tv/w/cIWSKDM2NjgwMnwxRFhHeXBvWk9qbktNNmewW09RZ16OwhG3UpkNedaWKRmj22baoP9KZVwAJis=?t=21m46s 

Mr. Trump said the operation had help from Russia, Syria and Turkey, and he gave a half-hearted nod to the Kurds though there are indications it would not have happened without Kurdish intelligence help from the ground. 

All of those entities want to get rid of ISIS as much as we do, so working together was a good thing. But there is irony in that of course, because of the events of last week. Russia, Turkey and Syrian Dictator Bashir Assad have one less thing to worry about as they try to redraw the map of Syria to their advantage at the expense of the Kurds.     

No one is going to argue that Baghdidi was a monster and taking him out was a good thing.  His so-called “Caliphate” murdered thousands of people, including be-headings. Trump can take credit for moving ahead on this mission. But it was a victory for the United States as a nation, not for Donald Trump as an individual or as a candidate for re-election. 

(Official White House photo of
Trump watching the raid in the Situation Room) 

And that is why I must also note that the White House bypassed the usual procedure for such raids and did not inform the congressional leadership about the raid beforehand. It is standard procedure, under the spirit if not the letter of the War Powers Act, that the White House notify congressional leadership before taking any military action. Apparently, Trump told the Republican leaders, but left out Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

Trump said he watched the entire Saturday raid unfold in real time.   The White House released the photo seen above of Trump watching the raid, but note, they are all looking directly at the camera, indicating it may have been re-staged after the actual event. 

Then there is this:
It was great to see the Washington Nationals in their first World Series. D.C.'s long-suffering baseball fans deserved it. Gerardo Parra had a great season--one of the reasons the Nats made it to the fall classic. But lets hope he finds a better walk up than that ridiculous “Baby Shark” song for next year.  

          (Your comments and suggestions are welcome)

(Copies of my book "The Campaign" can be purchased at Amazon.com, or BN.com. Or you can email me at HankSilverberg@gmail.com for details on how to get a signed copy at a vastly reduced price. )