Donald Trump has always reminded anyone who would listen that he is the “King of Debt”.

Given his record at the 271-day mark in the Oval Office, we can’t but wholeheartedly agree. The Donald’s Treasury Department has borrowed an average of $95 million dollars per hour on a 24/7 basis ever since inauguration day!

As Senator Dirksen famously said, pretty soon it adds up to real money—-in this case, the net Federal debt has risen from $19.6 trillion to $2.23 trillion. That a $613 billion gain since January 20—-and annualizes to a $825 billion run rate or 4.3% of GDP.

Moreover, rather than coming from economic factors at the bottom of a recession, this is a deliberate, policy-driven outcome 100 months into a long-in-the-tooth business expansion. By way of comparison, the longest GDP expansion on record, which occurred under the far more beneficent conditions of the 1990s, was just 118 months and the average since 1950 is only 61 months.

Even as the nation has drifted ever deeper into fiscal profligacy for several decades now there was at least a passing belief and practice in the Imperial City that said deficits should shrink as the economy recovers and approaches so-called full employment.

By the lights of the BLS and the Keynesian priesthood, we are now there. Yet fiscal policy is still operating with a wide-open throttle—-in a manner that is completely unprecedented.

We mention the nation’s baleful fiscal condition because the events of last week underscored the perfect storm of aggravating forces now working to make it far worse. And when this gathering fiscal storm reaches critical mass, its explosive impact will shatter the massive bubbles throughout the financial markets.

Thus, it was officially announced on Friday that the Federal deficit for FY 2017 rose for the third year running to $666 billion and is now 51% higher than the 2015 post-recession low ($439 billion).

At the same time, the  GOP Congress threw in the white flag completely on arresting the surging national debt by embracing the Senate’s completely bogus FY 2018 budget resolution. And then to add insult to injury, the Donald explicitly aligned himself with Art Laffer’s preposterous lie that tax cuts pay for themselves.

That’s been pure snake oil, of course, ever since Laffer drew his infamous napkin back in the 1970s, but the Donald wasn’t loath to embrace his latest emission of quackery:

Art Laffer just said that he doesn’t know how a Democrat could vote against the big tax cut/reform bill and live with themselves!

The answer, of course, is that since the Jeffersonians were purged from the New Deal in the 1930s, the Democrats have always been ready to tax anything that moves and anything that stands still, too, in order to fund Big Government budgets—–which even then required a goodly dollop of borrowing.

That did not lead to the fiscal ruin of the Republic, however. That’s because the GOP of Hoover, Taft, Eisenhower, Dirksen, Goldwater, and Ford not only kept the old-time religion of fiscal rectitude burning brightly, but effectively forced its observance in national policy.

President Eisenhower balanced the budget three times during his tenure and kept the average deficit to under 1% of GDP.  Similarly, the GOP Congress came down so hard on LBJ’s “guns and butter” deficits which reached 3% of GDP in 1968 that he was forced to enact a 10% surtax to bring the accounts back into balance.