It's not the president's budget. It’s the spending, stupid! Today’s deficits were pretty much baked into the cake long before Donald Trump entered the Oval Office: Opposing view

Stephen Moore | Opinion contributor

Should we worry about $1 trillion federal deficits for as far as the eye can see? Of course, yes. No great nation — just like a business or household — can keep loading up on debt year after year without risking a financial collapse.

But it is important to understand why we are running 13-digit deficits.

First, today’s deficits were pretty much baked into the cake long before Donald Trump entered the Oval Office. In fact, as a senior adviser to the campaign, one of the first charts I showed candidate Trump in early 2016 was the massive trillion dollars of excess expenditures over revenues — a problem that would get worse every year.

We’ve known for decades that due to the impending retirement of some 80 million baby boomers, the Titanic was headed toward this fiscal iceberg. Neither party did anything about it.

The Trump strategy was to rapidly grow the economy and jobs so that more tax revenue would come into the government. That part has mostly worked. We have some 6 million more Americans working today, higher wages and a rocketing stock market. As a result, American families and businesses paid more taxes (even after adjusting for inflation) than any other year in American history. Does that sound like we have a revenue problem?

OUR VIEW: Trump juices the economy with massive deficits

What we do have is an overspending problem. Since we passed the Trump tax cuts at the end of 2017, federal tax revenue is up from $3.316 trillion to $3.632 trillion — or $316 billion. The problem is federal spending has soared much faster, up by $665 billion in three years. Democrats want more for social programs. Republicans and Trump want more for the military, and so everything keeps rising.

To rebalance the budget and contain our spiraling debt, a good first step is to recognize the problem: It’s the spending, stupid!

Let’s hope we get some commonsense solutions to reduce our out of control budget before we go broke.

Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and served as a senior economic adviser to Donald Trump in 2016.