Which also connects to the deficit.
There was that debunked paper which doctored figures which claimed that once government debt reached 90% of GDP, things were just going to spiral out of control. They fudged the numbers to strengthen their case, but they do have half a point in the fact that a very large debt burden does actually become a thing!
The Trump 'budget' is insane. (And mean, and cruel, and illogical) And so the debt ceiling is an issue, and the annual deficit is an issue, and financing all that is an issue. You have Keynesian doctrine that dictates you save in the good times and spend in the bad times. You run deficits if you have to stimulate the economy, but if the economy is doing OK, run a surplus, pay down your overall debt and future proof your economy and invest in sensible forward looking programmes where the private sector is not looking to invest. Trump loves Norway's and Saudi Arabia's sovereign funds. Saudi Arabia's nearly evaporated when the oil price plummeted and they refused to increase their practically non existent taxes or decrease spending. Norway's however is doing fine, mainly because no one's talking about insane tax cuts (and they pay a lot) and hacking into it. Point being, Obama ran some horrendous deficits, but he had to. The bailouts were necessary. The economy was struggling and severely depressed, etc. People needed help, etc. Raising taxes would've made things worse (depending on how the money would've been spent, but it's a case of economy vs deficit, taxes are assumed to pay down the deficit, and extra spending vs a bigger deficit still is a debate independent of taxes.) Trump is potentially going to run a $1.2T USD deficit this year for NO REASON apart from making the filthy rich even richer, in a country that is now ranked #2 in the world for tax evasion, ignoring unethical avoidance. That is an insane number.
That puts government debt at > 100% of GDP in the near future. It puts servicing the debt at a higher cost than the entire US military within a decade, even assuming current incredibly cheap levels of repayments. (Something that will change if Trump has his way.) And so what does that mean exactly? That means US tax payers will be forking out many hundreds of billions of dollars every year just for the interest payments on the debt, let alone issuing new stuff. And who own the debt? Foreign countries. Corporations. Rich fuckers. Off shore tax havens. (Some retirees). The middle class will be working themselves to the bone so rent seekers can divest some of the risk in their portfolios and off shore hidden accounts can offer attractive annual rates of interest on deposits, without even looking at the beneficial programmes that money could have been spent on. The US is also about to hit the problem Japan had in the 90's in terms of demographics and retirees. Japan's problem was they all had super and payments in became payments out and equities took a huge hit, and there was a ton of bad debt and it had followed a decade of financial exuberance and success. The Nikkei 225 went up 700% between 1980 and 1990. It was about 15,000 for most of the 90's (down from nearly 40,000). It's going to add massive problems on the US deficit in terms of spending pressures, and also on assets if they do not keep their 401K's invested and cash them out.
All governments like cutting taxes, and like spending dollars. The Republicans are the government's that massively blow out the deficits for no reason though, even though Hayek would've hated that (and Keynes for different reasons, but they don't like Keynes). The US didn't have noticeable deficit problems until Reagan, and now, thanks to Bush, and the GFC, inability to pass proper non-profit gouging healthcare legislation, and Trump, it's about to hit insanely scary, horrific to maintain, super uncontrollable levels, which will be too painful to ever think about dialing in. Small surpluses would have no impact, and if you need to find more than a trillion dollars in revenue every year, just to simply balance the budget, it's a world of pain to inflict, to not even put a dent in the problem.
So yeah, insane numbers. Child's play compared to what's coming by 2025. Particularly if the economy starts to retract.
It's a budget for kleptocrats by kleptocrats, with a bunch of malicious idealism thrown in for good measure.