Remember when Donald Trump and the GOP were going to cut the deficit, pay off debt and otherwise right America’s fiscal ship?

No? You don’t remember that? That’s ok, I don’t either. Because as discussed in the latest Monthly Letter, that was never on the cards. Arguably, it wasn’t even in the plan, Project 2025 being a roadmap to autocracy not a blueprint for budget discipline.

Anyway, the CBO on Wednesday released its latest budget projections and they aren’t what any real fiscal hawk would describe as favorable.

Specifically, deficit reductions associated with Trump’s tariffs are more than offset by red ink from his tax cuts and deportation campaign, leaving a shortfall that’s $1.4 trillion wider over 10 years than it was in the office’s last forecast.

There’s the chart. The total deficit (i.e., inclusive of debt servicing costs) will exceed $3.1 trillion in 2036, CBO reckons. Using their forecasts for growth, that’d be about 6.7% of GDP.

For context, deficits averaged less than 4% of GDP over the last half century. If you exclude net interest costs, you get a primary deficit of 2.6% of GDP this year and 2.1% in a decade. The last time the US ran a primary surplus was 2007 and before that the late 1990s, when the country briefly ran an overall surplus.

Note from the chart that the deficit’s seen at 6% of GDP in 2028 which should be (but won’t necessarily be) Trump’s last year as president. Scott Bessent says the administration’s going to get the deficit down to 3% by then. Suffice to say he’s not on track.

The CBO update also serves as a reminder: You can’t gimmick your way to a better fiscal trajectory. Without casting aspersions, raising tariffs to offset runaway domestic spending while simultaneously cutting taxes for the rich and corporations and eliminating anything that even sounds like it might be a regulation, is the worst kind of gimmickry: It’s protectionism meets supply-side legerdemain. Grievance-driven mercantilism meets voodoo economics.

When you throw in draconian immigration curbs and a sweeping deportation push, you’re left staring at an extraordinarily convoluted picture and a plan that couldn’t work even if its architects were well-intentioned, which they most assuredly aren’t (now I’m casting aspersions).

The CBO’s projections suggest the US economy will sustain a growth rate of about 1.8% from 2027 through 2036, no different (at all) than trend growth for a highly-advanced economy like America’s, and nowhere near the unrealistic 3% goal set out by Bessent.

On the debt front, the CBO sees America’s debt-to-GDP ratio hitting 120% in 2036 which, the office noted in an oblique nod to critics’ contention that the US is on an “unsustainable” path, would be “well above the previous record of 106% just after World War II.”