The good news – if you choose to think of it that way – is that the federal government took in a record amount of tax revenue over the first half of the current fiscal year.
Between Oct. 1 and March 31, the feds raked in $1.7 trillion, according to a monthly report of the government’s balance sheet put out by the Treasury Department.
The bad news is that amount made up only half of what Washington spent for that same six-month period, as federal spending and the federal budget deficit also hit peak levels.
Overall, federal spending reached $3.4 trillion during that time. Which meant the deficit was $1.7 trillion.
Terrence Jeffrey of the conservative website CNSNews.com put this into context with some analysis on Monday.
He showed that, contrary to typical liberal platitudes, former President Donald Trump’s tax cuts were not harmful.
“The highest tax collections in the October-through-March period before this fiscal year was last fiscal year,” Jeffrey noted of the pre-COVID economic activity.
“In the first six months of fiscal 2020, the federal government collected $1,645,524,310,000 in taxes in constant March 2021 dollars.”
The Treasury Department report shows that Individual income taxes made up almost half of the government’s 2021 revenue, clocking in at $825 billion. That, in fact, was about $55.2 billion more than individual Americans paid in income taxes for the first half of the fiscal year 2020.
And those nasty corporations who never pay taxes, according to President Joe Biden, saw their taxes go up.
Collectively, they paid $104 billion so far in 2021, compared to $84 billion during the first half of the last fiscal year.
The downside, as Jeffrey detailed, is how we’ve blown out the budget with the pandemic.
“This year’s October-through-March spending of $3,410,194,000,000 was up $1,001,598,370,000 (or 42 percent) from last year’s $2,408,595,630,000 in spending (in March 2021 dollars) for that period,” Jeffrey wrote.
Additionally, he noted, “The highest October-through-March federal spending before this year took place in fiscal 2009 when the federal government spent $2,424,053,730,000 in constant March 2021 dollars.”
In other words, we’ve brought in only half of what we’ve spent this year, and over the first half of this year, we’ve spent $1 trillion more than we’ve ever spent for the first half of any fiscal year.
Washington has taken the Doritos approach to govern. The snack-maker once urged us, “Crunch all you want. We’ll make more.” Our betters seem to believe that about printing money.