In the most recent quarter, federal government spending grew a whopping 7.9 percent at a seasonally adjusted annual rate. That’s the highest pace in a decade. Specifically, the last time it was higher was just after the Recovery Act was passed to combat the Great Recession:

The latest government spending number might be inflated by an accounting quirk related to how the Bureau of Economic Analysis factored in the federal shutdown from December and January. But in any case, these data also reflect numbers notched before the latest budget deal, which would also grow government spending. It’s almost like when a Republican is in the White House, the GOP doesn’t actually care about reining in either spending or deficits, despite all those tantrums about red ink spilled during the Obama years.

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Deficits can also widen because of changes to the other side of the ledger, i.e., taxes. And in addition to overseeing massive spending increases, Republicans also slashed tax revenue when they had unified control of government, though they argued these cuts would eventually pay for themselves.

How’s that working out? Well, Friday’s GDP report contained a telling nugget on this matter, too.

The way tax cuts were allegedly going to pay for themselves was by boosting nonresidential fixed investment — that is, business spending on things like factories, structures and equipment. Faster business investment would supercharge GDP growth and wages and, therefore, lead to higher aggregate taxes paid on business and personal incomes.

But in the second quarter, nonresidential fixed investment spending instead fell by 0.6 percent annualized. The numbers can be noisy from quarter to quarter, so we shouldn’t overemphasize any one reading. But the trend the past few quarters has also not been great, or at least not discernibly better than it was pre-tax cuts.