By James J. Devine
The federal government has sprinted past the $1 trillion deficit mark just five months into the fiscal year, a staggering sum that nonetheless arrives with a confusing twist: red ink is flowing at a slightly slower pace than last year’s record-setting gush.
New data from the Joint Economic Committee, released Friday, shows the government spent $307.5 billion more than it took in during February alone. That brings the total deficit for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1 to $1.004 trillion. For every dollar the Treasury has collected since October, it has spent $1.48.
Those numbers landed with the weight of a government-issue safe shortly after the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the US economy lost 92,000 jobs in February 2026, marking a significant downturn and causing the unemployment rate to tick up to 4.4%.
Nearly one-third of every dollar the government spends — 32.38 percent, to be exact — is borrowed money. Americans aren’t just funding their government; they’re funding their grandchildren’s share, too.
Here’s the part that makes economists scratch their heads: this year’s five-month deficit is actually 12.4 percent lower than the $1.147 trillion recorded during the same period last year.
Government receipts climbed nearly 11 percent, bolstered by a surprise source. Tariff collections hit $151 billion through February, a staggering 294 percent jump from the previous year.
For a brief, bizarre moment, import taxes actually surpassed corporate income tax revenues — something that hasn’t happened since before most Americans were born.
But don’t break out the party streamers just yet.
The Congressional Budget Office sees storm clouds ahead, projecting full-year deficits climbing from $1.85 trillion this year to more than $2 trillion by 2028.
And the national debt, now pushing $39 trillion, cost $79 billion in interest payments just last month — more than the government spent on health care.
Meanwhile, a separate economic puzzle continues to confound the White House. Despite President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs — the highest effective rates since 1935, according to Yale economists — America’s trade deficit in goods hit a record $1.24 trillion in 2025.
The numbers tell a story the administration doesn’t want to hear: imports from China fell, but imports from Mexico, Vietnam, and Taiwan surged to take their place.
The trade gap with Vietnam alone ballooned by nearly $55 billion.
Which brings us to the late Robert Solow, the Nobel Prize-winning economist who once observed that he ran “a chronic trade deficit with my barber, who doesn’t buy a darned thing from me.”
His point, lost on a generation of politicians who think trade is like a scoreboard at a football game, was simple: bilateral trade deficits are economic noise. What matters is whether a nation lives within its means overall.
The White House sees things differently.
Trump’s 2025 executive order declaring a “national emergency due to trade” argued that “large and persistent annual U.S. goods trade deficits constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and economy of the United States.”
Never mind that the U.S. has run persistent trade deficits since 1976, or that those deficits reflect a strong dollar and a consuming public with money to spend.
The tariff war has certainly raised money — more than $236 billion through November. But it has also raised prices for ordinary consumers.
Democrats on the Joint Economic Committee estimate American families have paid more than $1,700 each in tariff costs since Trump took office, with total consumer costs exceeding $231 billion between February 2025 and January 2026.
The Supreme Court tossed out the administration’s tariff regime in late February, but the damage — and the confusion — lingers. Importers are still trying to figure out whether they’ll get refunds on duties already paid.
In response, Trump simply imposed new tariffs after the ruling, daring the courts to keep up.
All of which brings the nation back to where it started: borrowing more than a trillion dollars a year, arguing about trade deficits that won’t budge, and watching the interest payments mount.
The government’s own numbers show tax revenues rising, spending climbing faster, and the gap between them yawning wide enough to drive a truckload of imported goods straight through.
Donald Trump is a grifter who inherited a lot of money, and knows virtually nothing about economics and does not care how his policies impact ordinary Americans, who are doomed to keep paying for the neofascist Republican’s blunders.
The U.S. economy staggered into 2026 with growth slowing to a crawl, inflation stubbornly stuck near three percent, and a government that keeps borrowing itself blind.
The skies over Tehran burn tonight. And Tel Aviv. And God knows where else by the time you read this. The United States and Israel have launched thousands of missiles into Iran, striking military installations and, inevitably, heavily populated areas where real people live real lives and now lie dead. The Iranians, to absolutely no one’s surprise, are firing back. Shahed drones buzz over tourist destinations that appeared in brochures last year.
The 48th wave of retaliatory strikes has damaged American aircraft in Saudi Arabia. Five tankers, sitting on the ground at Prince Sultan Air Base, turned into fireballs. The war Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Donald Trump wanted but nobody saw coming has arrived, and it is making house calls.
What is striking about this moment, if you can pull your eyes away from the footage of explosions, is how everyone involved seems to believe the other side will eventually quit. Israelis support the war overwhelmingly, but they also understand, quietly, that the United States will decide when it ends. The White House, meanwhile, has produced a National Security Strategy that reads like it was written by people who have never considered the possibility that the other side might win, or that everyone might lose so badly that winning becomes a meaningless concept. They are very good at declaring themselves the best at everything. They are less good at explaining how we avoid the end of everything.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the Doomsday Clock to 85 seconds to midnight in January. This was not an abstract exercise. It was a warning, issued by people who spend their lives studying how the world might end. They pointed to nuclear rhetoric, collapsing arms control agreements, climate change accelerating beyond our ability to stop it, artificial intelligence advancing without safeguards, and the rise of nationalist autocracies that view cooperation as weakness. They might as well have saved the ink and just printed: We Told You So.
And here we are. The United States and Iran are shooting at each other directly, not through proxies. Russia watches and waits. China calculates its advantage. The last major nuclear arms treaty expires this year, and the administration is talking about resuming explosive nuclear testing, just for fun, just to remind everyone who has the biggest toys. Meanwhile, the climate keeps warming, the oceans keep rising, and the scientists keep warning that mirror life or AI-designed pathogens could wipe us out in ways that make nuclear war look almost quaint. It is 85 seconds to midnight. The clock is ticking. The question is whether anyone in power can tell time.
Americans need not wonder if the bill for all of it will ever come due. We only need to worry about how much it is going to cost if the richest and most powerful nation on the planet survives, assuming Trump does not bring life on Earth to an end.