BUDGET/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “On Monday [2-10-20], President Trump released his proposal for the 2021 federal budget. Although a president’s budget is a clear statement of policy priorities, many of the provisions never actually get through Congress. To better understand how federal spending has changed since Mr. Trump has taken office, we looked at the actual budget amounts for the 2020 fiscal year. We divided them by the U.S. population and sized the numbers proportionally to make their scale easier to visualize. Then we compared the numbers to the actual budget for the 2016 fiscal year, adjusting for inflation and population changes. Total federal spending has increased by $1,441 per person since 2016. Most of that has contributed to the nation’s deficits, because revenues went up by just $125 per person during that same period.”
–Alicia Parlapiano and Quoctrung Bui, “The Federal Budget Under Trump, Per Person,” The New York Times online, February 11, 2020