COVID-19 relief pushes U.S. budget deficit to a record $3.1 tril

3.1 trillion dollars, eh? And just how much of that did the American people receive?

Trump's economy is a complete and utter disaster. It's been 100 years since a president left the economy so poorly at the end of his term. Worst presidenting ever.

Trump's virus pushed Trump's economy over the edge, creating Trump's disastrous America.

3.1 trillion dollars, eh? And just how much of that did the American people receive?

Good question. Mnuchin, Trump, McConnell etal are not going to let the public know which big corporations got big public money and how big those bailouts were.

Trump and his fellow Republican's aim has been to help Wall Street and let Main Street sniff the fumes of their trickle down.

Millions of Americans are suffering financially. Trump and his R's can't be bothered.

Good question. Mnuchin, Trump, McConnell etal are not going to let the public know which big corporations got big public money and how big those bailouts were.

Or maybe they smelled something fishy with Pelosi's offer.

The previous coronavirus relief package, the CARES Act, only allowed those who filed with a Social Security number to be eligible for stimulus money, leaving out undocumented aliens. The current bill, if passed, would also retroactively provide those using Taxpayer Identification Numbers to obtain funds from the CARES Act, according to the Federation for American Immigration Reform.

The House Speaker said in late April that Democratic leaders were in discussions to include a provision for Taxpayer Identification Numbers in the next coronavirus relief package.

The bill “pertains to the TIN provision giving illegal aliens access to any new stimulus payments and retroactively providing them with payments from the CARES Act,” Preston Huennekens, a government relations associate with FAIR, told the Daily Caller News Foundation on Tuesday.

“FAIR estimates there are 14.3 million illegal aliens, meaning that in the last stimulus alone illegal aliens could have received over $17 billion in direct payments from the Federal government,” Huennekens continued.

So good on Trump and McConnell to once again stop the liberal madness that has engulfed and tainted the Democrat party.

Trump and his fellow Republican's aim has been to help Wall Street and let Main Street sniff the fumes of their trickle down.

Not really, but Joe has, this is why Big Tech companies like Amazon (Bezos) WP...ring a bell? They all support Biden.

Millions of Americans are suffering financially. Trump and his R's can't be bothered.

So then why won't these Democrat governors and mayors allow the job creators to go to work and help these people? We know they have enough money, but the people they're keeping locked down is slowly killing them, why they have no shame? Poor people cannot provide jobs, don't they understand this?

Thanks, Trump.

The Republican Party stands for fiscal discipline - we must not pass debt on to our children and grandchildren....

Our party stands firmly for a balanced budget amendment and no spending that can't be offset by revenue...

To quote the Monkees; that was then, this is now...

COVID-19 relief pushes U.S. budget deficit to a record $3.1 tril

Liars and hypocrites...

Reduce taxes on the upper 1% and pass the real cost to future generations that will have to pay higher taxes, deal with an ever rising cost of living while still being only paid not enough to keep ahead of living expenses... all while decreasing the value of the all mighty US dollar.

If taxes were paid properly without the GOPs "pretend like its great tax cuts" followed by "oh no the economy is crashing for some reason..."

EVERY SINGLE TIME FOLKS...

GOP in power it will always be short term gain, long term pain.

 Poor people cannot provide jobs, don't they understand this?

Being rich doesn't provide jobs either. Since you're spoiled elitism can't grasp the actual problem, let me point it out for you. CONSUMERS CREATE JOBS. Instead of focusing on a select few being prosperous at the expense of everyone else, how about focusing on making the majority of of the people of a country prosperous? The more consumers created by prosperity for ALL = less poverty, a healthier and more stable economy, better QoL for everyone. Instead, we currently have only a small percentage being "prosperous" until the money either runs out or inflates to the point of garbage.

You don't have less poverty by making more people unable to get out of poverty, you make less poverty by making everyone more prosperous! Your way has been around for decades and look at where this country is now.

Consumer based capitalism is needed very badly here, not crony based corporate capitalism.

No, not every American wants to have a mansion, or a yacht, or an expensive supercar... give people a comfortable home, meet their basic needs, and enable them to have extra spending/saving money left over. You'd be surprised at how peaceful and stable things would be.

total hypocrites. His supporters too.

Honest Dictator, if the US ever wants to start to reverse the trade imbalance the value of the US Dollar absolutely must fall in value relative to other currencies. That is a pre-requisite. To get to that point however requires the US to run balanced budgets or better yet slight surpluses to begin paying the national debt down.

Debt financing of annual budgets has given US trade partners the means to perpetuate the US trade deficit. Notice that the US just posted an all time high trade deficit for Fiscal Year 2020 (remember the Fiscal Year runs from 1 Oct to 30 Sep, we're in FY21 now). That is due primarily to high budget deficits. In a normal free trade scheme with freely floating currency values, a nation running a trade deficit should see the value of its currency decline . Why? Because more US dollars are going out of the country to buy things than are coming back in payment for US goods sold abroad. As a result US dollars accumulate abroad. Money is like any other commodity in that if there is a surplus of it, it should lose value. When that happens the terms of trade change, US goods become cheaper in trade while foreign goods become relatively more expensive. Those changes in the terms of trade should reverse the trade deficit. Over time trade imbalances should even out.

However the US runs current account deficits every year since 1981 with two exceptions, 1999 and 2000. Those deficits are financed by selling bonds. Trade partners with a trade surplus with the US have learned to use their piles of excess US dollars to buy US Treasuries. This acts to keep the value of the US dollar high in trade while keeping the value of their currency low, perpetuating the terms of trade unfavorable to the US. The saving grace for the consumer has been an abundance of cheap imported goods that has acted to keep inflation low despite the annual budget deficits. However some trade partners experience inflation as a result of their nations being flooded with US dollars which local firms exchange for their currency, expanding their domestic money supply rapidly. This is what led to the twin bubbles in Japan and currently inflates the Chinese economy to a degree (though the Chinese know full well the dangers inherent, having watched what happened to Japan in the 1990s.

The only way to remedy the US trade deficit is to run budget surpluses for a very long time. The US can easily afford to as it's tax burden, meaning all government revenues from all sources at all levels of government as a proportion of GDP, is a full ten percent below the OECD average while spending is only slightly above 36% of GDP, the OECD average tax burden. But raising taxes in the US is hard to do even when it is economically vital to do so. There are times when deficit spending is economically appropriate, but afterwards taxes must rise to pay the debt down.

Consumer based capitalism is needed very badly here, not crony based corporate capitalism.

That doesn't explain the problem. The problem is a lack of effective competition in many very big consumer markets. Don't let the vast number of different brand names one sees on the supermarket or big box store shelves fool you. Much of what the consumer buys is made by a very small number of firms that are able to exert large amounts of control over the markets they sell in.

When Adam Smith and David Ricardo described the benefits of competitive markets, they envisioned markets with so many buyers and sellers that no one party to a market could do anything on their own to affect the market price. All market participants were said to be price takers, meaning they took price set by the broad sweep of forces in that particular market. In a fully competitive market output and price are set where the supply and demand curves intersect. At that point output is maximized (firms can not increase output further without losing money) and both price and profit are minimized. If firms in a market are able to set price above that point the added profits should draw in more competitors who will increase output and lower price.

In the US however you see companies like Pepsico dominating not just soft drinks but also snack foods (Pepsico owns Frito Lay, and they basically own the potato chip isle). Their only major soft drink competitor is Coke. Nearly every other brand of drink in the supermarket is owned by either Coke or Pepsico. Same thing for household and personal cleaners. Colgate Palmolive, Unilever and Proctor and Gamble own that market. In the beer isle it is Miller Coors vs Anheiser Busch. Nearly all those, cough cough, "microbrews" on the beer isle are divisions of Miller Coors or Anheiser Busch. How about FedEx vs UPS? They are over 90% of the small package delivery market.

I think everyone knows monopolies are a bad thing as they can set prices higher and restrict their output to maximize their profits. That difference in price between what the monopolist can charge and what the price would be in a fully competitive market represents a wealth transfer from consumers to the monopolist. It is a deadweight loss to the economy. Nobody will argue with that statement. But if you have too few firms in a market they start to price like monopolists and earn a degree of monopoly profits. This is a situation called "Oligopoly" Without regurgitating a century of economic research there needs to be a bare minimum of six firms with roughly equal market share to achieve the benefits of full competition. That doesn't mean two big firms like Coke and Pepsi and a handful of tiny firms competing at the edges but six firms of about equal size slugging it out. The US doesn't have this in too many major markets. It has markets dominated by oligopolies. Those monopoly profits earned by these oligopolies represent the same kind of deadweight loss to the economy as happens in a full monopoly. Moreover there is the same wealth transfer from consumers to the oligopolies occurring and that my friends is the true big wealth transfer going on in the US. The US needs to break up a lot of very big and powerful firms but don't hold your breath because these same firms own too many members of Congress at this point. It took a decade just to break up Standard Oil. It might take a lifetime to set the US economy right and restore something resembling fully competitive markets.

$3.1T is about $9400 per person in the USA.

Directly giving that cash to people, partially, every 2 weeks, say $500 each payment, would have really helped, assuming it was slanted higher for unemployed and phased out for upper-middle-class families.

Some Americans can't be trusted with $20; if it is in their wallet, it gets spent, hence the need for payments every 2 weeks.

BTW, almost all Americans received some benefit from Trump's tax reduction. Check the facts. Fact checking organizations have.

Whether the deficit is a problem has been debated in the US for a long time. To me, it is a terrible weight on our country and I'd have a mandated 5% surplus until the deficit is under $500M, then have a 1-2% surplus mandated for emergencies and long term infrastructure projects. A budget like adults would have, not like a drunken sailor.

BTW, almost all Americans received some benefit from Trump's tax reduction. Check the facts. Fact checking organizations have.

It made no difference for us one way or the other but had I not already paid my house off the mortgage interest cap would have hurt me quite a bit.

Whether the deficit is a problem has been debated in the US for a long time. To me, it is a terrible weight on our country and I'd have a mandated 5% surplus until the deficit is under $500M, then have a 1-2% surplus mandated for emergencies and long term infrastructure projects. A budget like adults would have, not like a drunken sailor.

The rub is this requires tax increases and those have become politically almost impossible to implement. If the US tax burden was at the OECD average we would have pretty close to a balanced budget. Germany somehow manages to have a tax burden right at the OECD average, 36% of GDP and still have a strong economy including being the second largest exporter in the world with minimal debt. There are times when GDP is declining when running a deficit is essential (the equation of national income makes it clear), but once GDP growth returns taxes must be raised to pay the debt back.

The equation of national income is:

GDP = C + I + G + ( EX - IM ). In words, GDP is the sum of consumption, investment, government spending and next exports. In a recession / depression, GDP is falling. That generally is because C and I are falling. If you cut G as some demand (austerity) you accelerate the decline in GDP and make the recession / depression worse. When GDP is falling, you increase G (fiscal stimulus) to reduce the decline in GDP and increase C. But once GDP growth resumes and stabilizes you have to raise taxes again to pay the debt back.

The US has poured over $9 trillion into the military over the last 11 years. Where's the outrage? Where did it go? What did you get from it? You got jobs and it went into the economy.

The money from relief bills goes right back into the economy. Where do you think it goes? A secret stash for liberals under their beds to be spent later?

Relief money goes right back into the economy to pay bills, pay rent, pay insurance, pay car payments, pay utilities, pay for food.

A 12 year-old understand it. Too bad the Republican critters in Congress and Fox News don't understand it.

Japan has a much higher debt-to-GDP ratio than the US. This gets trotted by news writers copying and pasting the same dire warnings all the time for the last 35 years and the nation hasn't sunk into the abyss yet.

The US median household income is $61, 372.

The average household debt is $137,063.

OMG! That's 2.23 *time***s** the household GDP! It's the end of the world!