What February’s Largest-Ever U.S. Monthly Budget Deficit Portends for Ordinary Americans

Lost in all the noisy drama and aftermath of Attorney General William Barr’s release of his controversial four-page “summary” of the Mueller report was news that the U.S. in February recorded its largest monthly budget deficit in the history of recording such figures. According to Bloomberg, the budget gap for February was $234 billion, exceeding the previous record of $231.7 billion registered seven years ago when the nation was still recovering from the Great Recession.

This news represents an important revelation for assessing exactly where President Trump’s economic policies are leading us as a nation and what the economy’s trajectory portends for the ordinary citizens, those of the 99 percent, living in the United States.

In short, Trump’s policies aren’t helping, and the prospects aren’t looking good.

So much for trickle-down economics and the ever-recycled myth that tax cuts pay for themselves.

A large driver of this deficit are, perhaps not surprisingly to anyone not clinging stubbornly to the myth of trickle-down economics, the 2017 Trump tax cuts. The month of February witnessed a 20 percent decline in corporate tax revenue. In 2017, before the tax cuts went into effect, corporate tax receipts at this point in…