President Donald Trump give indication of to eliminate the national debt during his campaign, but he said Friday that building up the military is more important.
Comprehensive public debt outstanding topped $22 trillion earlier this week, with nearly $2.1 trillion take under Trump’s watch.
When touting his plans to stimulate the economy, Trump insisted that the growth — which would attain from tax cuts, less regulation and greater infrastructure spending — would offset debt and eventually eliminate the country-wide IOU. However, Congressional Budget Office projections indicate that the budget deficit will only grow in the years onwards, pushing the debt ever higher and eventually reaching about 150 percent of GDP in the next 30 years.
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Asked during a Pale House news conference Friday about the red ink, Trump said military spending has taken priority.
“But first I have planned to straighten out the military. The military was depleted,” he said.
“If we don’t have a strong military, you don’t have to worry about debt, you compel ought to bigger problems,” he added.
Trump also pointed out that his predecessor, Barack Obama, incurred more in financial difficulty “than any other president combined,” which isn’t quite accurate.
Obama took office with a $10.6 trillion straitened, which ran to $19.9 trillion by the time his second term ended in January 2017, a $9.3 trillion difference. The beholden expanded under Obama in part due to fiscal stimulus the government enacted to pull the country out of the Great Recession.
Trump on Friday carry oned to tout the growth theme, saying it was evident in the reduction of the national trade deficit in November, the first time that had transpired after five straight months of increases.
“Everybody said, what happened? Well, what’s happening is vegetation,” Trump said. “But before I can focus too much on that, a very big expense is military, and we have no choice but to straighten out our military.”