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US Budget Deficit
The US budget deficit in July climbed 20 per cent this fiscal year compared to the last despite the US taking in record income from President Donald Trump's tariffs, according to Treasury Department data released Tuesday. The US saw a 273 per cent increase - or USD21 billion - in customs revenue in July over the same period last year, the data showed. A Treasury official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preview the data said overall increased spending is in part due to a mix of expenditures, including growing interest payments on the public debt and cost-of-living increases to Social Security payouts, among other costs. This comes as the federal government's gross national debt creeps up to the USD37 trillion mark. Even as Trump talks about America becoming rich because of his import tax hikes, federal spending keeps outpacing the revenues collected by the government. That financial picture might change as companies exhaust their pre-tariff inventories, forcing them to ...
The US budget deficit has grown to more than $1.3 trillion in the first half of the 2025 fiscal year the second highest six-month deficit on record, according to Treasury Department data. The deficit for October through March spans the administrations of President Joe Biden and President Donald Trump. The previous high in the four decades of recordkeeping was $1.7 trillion in the first half of fiscal year 2021, when the government was tackling the COVID-19 pandemic, said the data released Thursday. A Treasury official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preview the data said the increased spending was in part due to a mix of expenditures, including cost of living increases to Social Security payouts, higher Medicare and Medicaid costs, increased disaster assistance to the Federal Emergency Management Agency and Defense Department spending. The widening deficit, which occurs when spending exceeds the amount of money being raised, comes as the Trump administration has touted a
Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has proposed a Zero-Base Federal Budgeting to solve the national debt crisis, which has now gone up to USD33 trillion. The US national debt crisis is real and will take a CEO from outside of politics to fix it, he said on Monday. "Here's how we fix the debt crisis: zero-base budgeting. Start from zero for every department and ask what (if any) spending is required instead of just taking last year's budget as the default," Ramaswamy said. That is how any good CEO would handle this mess, and it is something that both Republicans and Democrats can get behind, he added. "Unfortunately, there isn't a single red or blue state in this country that actually does it," Ramaswamy added. "I built a multibillion-dollar biotech company from scratch by developing five medicines now FDA-approved that the bureaucracy in big pharma abandoned," he said. "I built an insurgent asset manager to compete head-on with BlackRock and Vanguard by leading the
Even with the new spending restraints in the debt limit deal that cut borrowing by USD 1.5 trillion, the US government's deficits are still on course to keep climbing to record levels over the next few decades. The projections are a sign that the two-year truce between President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., might be only a pause before a far more wrenching set of showdowns over the federal budget. The Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday that the agreement would reduce spending by USD 1.3 trillion and interest payments by USD 188 billion over 10 years. But that sum is too modest to fully offset the growing costs of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Both Biden and McCarthy ruled out any cuts to Social Security and Medicare, two programs that benefit older voters, before their teams even began their budget talks. That omission reflects the politics around two popular programs as Democrats and Republicans prepare for next year's presidential ...