CNSNews.com editor in chief Terry Jeffrey has not been shy about blaming Democrats in general and President Obama in particular for federal budget deficits. Republicans? Much more shy, though even he can’t ignore reality, finally admitting that the federal debt has climbed under President Trump and a Republican Congress.
Jeffrey backtracked a bit in a Feb. 13 article in which he touted how The federal government collected a record $1,665,484,000,000 in individual income taxes in calendar year 2018,” the first full year after Trump’s tax cuts went into effect. But he waited until the fifth paragraph to admit that the deficit grew by $1.4 million (though it was mentioned in the headline) and the eighth paragraph to note that “Corporation income tax collections declined significantly from calendar year 2017 to calendar year 2018” by more than 32 percent, or $95 billion.
Jeffrey followed that up by lamenting in a Feb. 20 article that “The Congressional Budget Office is projecting that the federal government will not only fail to balance its budget in any year over the next eleven years (fiscal 2019 through 2029), but that during those eleven years it will increase the federal debt held by the public by $13 trillion.” Jeffrey did not mention Trump or the Republican Congress that helped to run up that projected deficit or set the baseline upon which the CBO’s projection is based.
Jeffrey then served up a Feb. 28 lament that “The United States has gone a record 13 straight years without 3-percent growth in real Gross Domestic Product.” This comes around six months after CNS was touting a big quarterly GDP increase under Trump (and despite the fact that CNS never touted even larger quarterly GDP increases under Obama).
Jeffrey made no mention of Trump or Republicans in his article, though in 2017 he was quick to point out that “Obama remains the first president since the Great Depression not to see a single year with at least 3 percent growth in real GDP.” Instead, Jeffrey includes a picture of congressional leaders at some social function.
In other words, Jeffrey is unable to say out loud that his hero Trump isn’t doing any better on the economy than the hated Obama.That has to be a blow considering how much he and the rest of his CNS crew have puffed up Trump’s economic record.