By Steve Brawner, © 2020 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

What has been expected is now pretty much official: the federal government will spend $1 trillion more this year than it will collect, and it will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

Whose fault is that? Everybody’s, according to Rep. Steve Womack, who represents Northwest Arkansas in Congress.

The $1 trillion forecast – equal to about $3,000 in red ink for every American – came from the Congressional Budget Office Tuesday. The CBO said Uncle Sam will spend $4.6 trillion this fiscal year while collecting only $3.6 trillion in taxes.

That $1 trillion will be added to the cumulative national debt, which has reached $23.2 trillion and counting, or about $70,000 for every American.

The news comes as no surprise. Last year’s deficit was $984 billion, or just $16 million shy of a trillion.

This will not be the first $1 trillion deficit. It happened four straight years during the first part of President Obama’s administration.

But those deficits occurred as the country was undergoing and recovering from the Great Recession. We’ve never had a $1 trillion deficit in an economy this good.

This time there’s no end in sight. CBO estimates that by the end of the decade, the government will have run budget deficits totaling $13.1 trillion. In 2030 alone, the government will spend $1.7 trillion more than it collects.

Womack is the House Budget Committee’s ranking Republican. Responding to the report Wednesday in a hearing with CBO Director Phillip Swagel, he noted that mandatory spending is 70 percent of the federal budget and the primary driver of the nation’s mounting fiscal challenges. Mandatory spending includes popular programs such as Social Security and Medicare. Congress doesn’t vote on these programs; they just continue on autopilot. Meanwhile, he defended the tax cuts passed under President Trump.

Mandatory spending also includes interest payments on the national debt. Last fiscal year, these totaled $383 billion. That’s more than $1,000 for every American to pay the nation’s credit card bill. Part of that went to foreign countries including Japan and China.

During his opening comments, Womack criticized Democrats for ignoring the deficit and for proposing programs that would make it worse. It was typical Washington blame-game politics.

By the end of the hearing, however, he was taking a different tack, saying, ”There’s enough stink on this deficit and debt issue to go around this room and around the Congress and around previous Congresses and previous presidents, left and right. We have all, on both sides of the aisle, failed … and we continue to do that.”

That’s certainly true. The federal government has been in debt since the 1830s, and the debt has quadrupled during the past 20 years. Both parties are to blame. According to the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, President Trump, a Republican, has signed into law $4.7 trillion of new debt for the years from 2017 to 2026. About half comes from spending increases, and half from tax cuts. That new debt was passed with help from a lot of Republican votes in Congress, including Womack’s.

For all their partisan bluster, Republicans and Democrats have a cozy arrangement. They separately vote to increase the kind of spending they (and their donors) like, and they avoid voting for tax hikes that would pay for these increases. Then they blame each other.

The arrangement works well for both sides. Almost everybody gets re-elected because today’s voters get a discount on big government and are mostly mad about other things. Meanwhile the people who are most harmed are too young to vote or donate money, or they haven’t been born.

Something must disrupt this arrangement. There’s no perfect solution, but to some degree Republicans and Democrats both must spend less on things they like.

If they agree to do that and the budget is balanced, great. But if there’s still a deficit and they refuse to spend any less, then the difference will have to be made up by increased tax revenues. The alternative is to keep stealing from our grandchildren.

Womack concluded by saying, “The fact is, Republicans and Democrats have to start behaving more like Americans and deciding what we’ve got to do now to solve the problems today rather than kick that can down the road and put it on future generations.”

I agree. And I look forward to seeing how he’ll help solve those problems. As he said, let’s start today.