OCT 18, 2024
The U.S. Treasury Department today released the final Monthly Treasury Statement for Fiscal Year (FY) 2024, confirming the budget deficit totaled $1.8 trillion.
The following is a statement from Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget:
Another fiscal year has come to an end and yet the nation’s economic outlook isn’t appearing any brighter. FY 2024’s deficit totaled $1.8 trillion, meaning we borrowed a whopping $5 billion on average every day. We’re borrowing nearly double the amount we borrowed annually before the pandemic, and this is projected to grow indefinitely. This is no way to run a country. In fact, the way we have been running the country is we don’t pass budgets; we don’t pay for new policies; we don’t address our major entitlement programs, which are facing insolvency; and we tolerate the two major presidential candidates competing over who can promise to give away more.
In FY 2024, we spent nearly $900 billion on interest on the debt alone. That’s more than we spent on national defense, Medicare, and children at the federal level – just a truly astounding figure. The national debt is on track to reach a record share of the economy in just two years, a sobering milestone for both the next Congress and whoever wins the presidency in November.
The next year will bring several fiscal hurdles for Congress and the new President to confront: the reinstatement of the debt limit, the end of discretionary spending caps, and the expiration of large parts of the tax code as well as health insurance subsidies. Paramount to confronting these challenges will be to ensure that we don’t grow those $2 trillion annual deficits into $2.5 or $3 trillion.
We need to put our national debt on a downward sustainable trajectory. Failure to do so will result in a smaller economy, higher interest rates, increased geopolitical threats, generational inequity, and a higher likelihood of a fiscal crisis.
QUINNSCOMMENTARY 
“Myth: Any new corporate taxes will just get passed on to consumers
Often, if taxes are raised (or other costs go up) for businesses, the owners say that they will just raise prices and pass the costs on to their customers.This claim is often accepted as fact because many people don’t know about “elasticity of demand”.
Elasticity of demand is perhaps the most important basic idea in economics that many people don’t know.It’s a little technical, so here’s a short version and a long version.
Short version:
You can only “just raise prices” to whatever you want if you have a monopoly on a necessity.If you don’t have a monopoly on a necessity, any corporate tax increase will be split between an increase in your prices and a drop in your profits.The balance between the two depends on the elasticity of demand for your product (see long version, below).
So the cost of corporate taxes are usually split between the companies and the customers.”
And…return marginal individual tax rates to 1980 levels.
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And if that is the case the earnings and stock price is affected. It’s all connected and not just the wealthy are affected by stock prices.
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No es problema.
Supply, demand, free market, etc.We can assume, according to Adam Smith, that the company was making excess profits. Eventually, the free market should even everything out. Excess (or “any” profit) creates competition.
But, the second thing we learned in Econ 101 was, there is no free market.
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and your suggested cuts are???
and you want Medicare for All which of course will be less expensive and not add to the runaway spending–fool me once shame on me–fool me twice shame on you.
let’s not forget that some folks believe that higher prices=inflation so using that definition raising corporate taxes will cause “inflation” to rear its ugly head as they just pass those taxes on to the consumer–remember when NJ instituted higher tax on gasoline–guess who paid–the Quinn family. Alcohol? Cigarettes? Plastic bags?
when you get serious and put cuts on the table there will be more credibility–until then it will take some of what is highlighted to bring us to our senses–an economic implosion would not surprise me.
most people I know when running into financial problems on a personal level look to see where they can trim the spending–maybe you and Connie did that at one time–maybe your children or grandchildren have had financial issues and I bet your advice, and good advice, would be to look first to reduce spending.
I say a 1% cut to begin with right across the board–why do we fund PBS? Planned Parenthood?–forgive (transfer to working poor) student loans–pay farmers not to grow? want to bet our grandchildren pay some tax on those inherited ROTH IRA accounts?
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