Plenty of observers already had doubts that, as Donald Trump put it on President’s Day, the U.S. has entered a “new golden age of prosperity.” Now, with the Supreme Court ruling negating a wide swath of the Trump tariffs, an already gloomy outlook has suddenly become much darker.
The new 10-year budget forecasts from the Congressional Budget Office, issued in mid-February, presents an outlook that’s considerably worse than the already dire scenario the agency issued a year earlier. The CBO’s bottom line: On balance, the tax reductions and spending hikes in the One Big Beautiful will increase the persistent shortfalls between revenues and outlays by amounts that swamp the extra take from tariffs, and the fleeting jump in GDP we’re witnessing right now.
