Too bad we didnt fiscally prepare for this.

While delivering an address Friday afternoon to declare a national emergency and outline plans for billions of dollars in emergency spending to combat the COVID-19 virus, President Donald Trump paused for a rare moment of reflection.

In addition to responding to the current coronavirus crisis, Trump said, the federal government would have to make changes to be better prepared for a similar event in the future. You hope that doesn't happen, he said, "but it will, I guess. Somewhere out there. [We've] had some bad ones over the years."


It's a shame he's three years too late in realizing that.

During Trump's first three years in office, he's signed off on spending plans that added at least $4.7 trillion to the national debt. The debt totals more than $23 trillion, a record high. When measured against the size of the economy, it is approaching the all-time record set during World War II. Annual budget deficits are expected to exceed $1 trillion for the rest of the decade, at least. The Government Accountability Office has called the nation's fiscal trajectory "unsustainable."

https://reason.com/2020/03/13/coronavirus-expensive-trump-congress-debt-deficit-huge/


Sure would be nice to be in a good financial position to take on this crisis.

Something about saving for a rainy day comes to mind.

Republicans always raise the debt and deficit. If it's not wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it's a corporate tax cut allowing the wealthy to cash in with buy-backs. Republicans are wishers and dreamers, unskilled in the pragmatics of government financing.

Democrats inevitably have to clean up the mess. George Bush inhereted from President Clinton a huge budget surplus--$1.9 billion in fiscal 1999, and then, $86.4 billion in fiscal 2000. In fact, the last three years of the Democratic Clinton presidency, the government regularly took in more money than it spent. However, Republican George Bush drove this into the ground. He ended his tenure with a near duplicate of the Great Depression. Obama had to bail us out, which he did quite deftly. Likewise, Trump took an energetic economy, left by Obama, and turned it into the recession we are now experiencing.

If you want a good financial position, tune in around the second half of the next Democratic administration, just after they have cleaned up the last Republican mess.