Donald Trump is pitching, as only Donald Trump can pitch, that a
major economic revival is energizing America for a new run at greatness,
and that he’s the straw stirring the elixir. In one representative
recent tweet, the President declared, “Our economy is now booming and
with all I am doing, will only get better … Our country is WINNING
again!”
Though “booming” is Trumpian overstatement, it’s undeniable that by many criteria, the President’s agenda is proving remarkably successful. In Trump’s first three full quarters in the White House, GDP clocked growth just shy of his vaunted goal of 3%, a performance that by recent standards looks stellar.
The stock market has added a quarter to its value since the election, a $5 trillion vote of confidence. The jaunty outlook is recharging animal spirits in corner offices: In its January survey of small companies, the National Federation of Independent Business found that 32% of the enterprises rated the present climate “a good time to expand”; that was a record high and a threefold increase from late 2016.
Fueling the giddiness is the President’s signature legislative achievement: the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which slashed rates for corporations from 35% to 21%. The new law is a runaway hit with business leaders. Companies as varied as American Airlines aal , Walmart wmt , and Verizon vz predict that the measure will swell their earnings for years to come, and marquee CEOs from JPMorgan Chase’s jpm Jamie Dimon to Boeing’s ba Dennis Muilenburg laud it as a powerful tonic for American competitiveness. The looming profit surge has prompted more than 200 Fortune 500 companies to raise their minimum pay (U.S. Bancorp, Humana), issue one-time bonuses to employees (Home Depot, Walt Disney), or both.
Trump’s heady economic potion, however, is masking misguided policies that could leave those same businesses with a severe hangover from today’s celebration. The U.S. government’s huge and growing budget deficits have become gargantuan enough to threaten the great American growth machine. And Trump’s policies to date—a combination of deep tax cuts and sharp spending increases—are shortening the fuse on that fiscal time bomb, by dramatically widening the already unsustainable gap between revenues and outlays. On our current course, we’re headed for a morass of punitive taxes, puny growth, and stagnant incomes for workers—a future that’s the precise opposite of what Trump champions.
By 2028, America’s
government debt burden could explode from this year’s $15.5 trillion to a
staggering $33 trillion—more than 20% bigger than it would have been
had Trump’s agenda not passed. At that point, interest payments would
absorb more than $1 in $5 of federal revenue, crippling the government’s
capacity to bolster the economy, and constraining the private sector
too. Contrary to the claims of the President and his supporters, the
U.S. can’t grow fast enough to shed this burden; indeed, Trump’s agenda
on immigration and trade looks likely to stunt that growth. (More on
that later.) “This is almost like climate change,” says Mark Zandi,
chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. “It doesn’t do you in this year,
or next year, but you’ll see the ill effects in a day of reckoning.”
In the absence of decisive, quick action to tackle this slow-motion crisis, the best-case scenario for the next few years is that America becomes a much riskier place to do business. A high debt load will limit our flexibility to keep the economy on an even course. “Countries with high debt don’t respond aggressively to downturns,” says Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff. If the U.S. slips into recession, we’ll lack the option of lowering taxes or increasing spending on infrastructure, for example, as tools to revive growth. And as the debt load grows, efforts by the Federal Reserve to stimulate the economy with lower rates would be more likely to feed runaway inflation. “Then, investors will dump Treasuries,” says John Cochrane, an economist at the Hoover Institution. “That will drive rates far higher, and make the budget picture even worse.”
Read More: How Debt Could Blow-Up the Trump Economy
Though “booming” is Trumpian overstatement, it’s undeniable that by many criteria, the President’s agenda is proving remarkably successful. In Trump’s first three full quarters in the White House, GDP clocked growth just shy of his vaunted goal of 3%, a performance that by recent standards looks stellar.
The stock market has added a quarter to its value since the election, a $5 trillion vote of confidence. The jaunty outlook is recharging animal spirits in corner offices: In its January survey of small companies, the National Federation of Independent Business found that 32% of the enterprises rated the present climate “a good time to expand”; that was a record high and a threefold increase from late 2016.
Fueling the giddiness is the President’s signature legislative achievement: the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which slashed rates for corporations from 35% to 21%. The new law is a runaway hit with business leaders. Companies as varied as American Airlines aal , Walmart wmt , and Verizon vz predict that the measure will swell their earnings for years to come, and marquee CEOs from JPMorgan Chase’s jpm Jamie Dimon to Boeing’s ba Dennis Muilenburg laud it as a powerful tonic for American competitiveness. The looming profit surge has prompted more than 200 Fortune 500 companies to raise their minimum pay (U.S. Bancorp, Humana), issue one-time bonuses to employees (Home Depot, Walt Disney), or both.
Trump’s heady economic potion, however, is masking misguided policies that could leave those same businesses with a severe hangover from today’s celebration. The U.S. government’s huge and growing budget deficits have become gargantuan enough to threaten the great American growth machine. And Trump’s policies to date—a combination of deep tax cuts and sharp spending increases—are shortening the fuse on that fiscal time bomb, by dramatically widening the already unsustainable gap between revenues and outlays. On our current course, we’re headed for a morass of punitive taxes, puny growth, and stagnant incomes for workers—a future that’s the precise opposite of what Trump champions.
In the absence of decisive, quick action to tackle this slow-motion crisis, the best-case scenario for the next few years is that America becomes a much riskier place to do business. A high debt load will limit our flexibility to keep the economy on an even course. “Countries with high debt don’t respond aggressively to downturns,” says Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff. If the U.S. slips into recession, we’ll lack the option of lowering taxes or increasing spending on infrastructure, for example, as tools to revive growth. And as the debt load grows, efforts by the Federal Reserve to stimulate the economy with lower rates would be more likely to feed runaway inflation. “Then, investors will dump Treasuries,” says John Cochrane, an economist at the Hoover Institution. “That will drive rates far higher, and make the budget picture even worse.”
Read More: How Debt Could Blow-Up the Trump Economy
