As the economy shows signs of cooling, record debt is lurking in the background.

Yesterday, the Treasury Department released its monthly statement on receipts and outlays showing that the deficit for the first 10 months of fiscal year 2019 is 27 percent higher than last year and 70 percent higher than during Obama’s final full year in 2016. In total, outlays through July topped $3.73 trillion, nearly $300 billion more than at this time last year. Meanwhile, revenue for the first 10 months of this year topped $2.86 trillion, roughly $100 billion more than this time last year.

Despite the complaints that the tax cuts would drain the Treasury, revenue is up three percent, but because spending skyrocketed by over eight percent, the deficit now stands at $867 billion with two months left to the fiscal year, 26.7 percent higher than this time last year. That means that our government is on track to bring back the trillion-dollar annual deficits of Obama’s first term.

For those keeping track, inflation is only increasing about 1.6 percent annually, so that is quite a spending accomplishment by the government.

With the unemployment rate below 4 percent for 16 consecutive months, one would expect economic growth to be soaring. Yet even as we experience the best job market since the late 1960s, this is the first time in modern history that we have not experienced a year of 3 percent GDP growth. What gives?

Earlier today, the Bureau of Economic Analysis announced that the economy had grown just 2.1 percent during the second quarter of this year (ending June 30). It also revised Q4 of 2018 down to just 1.1 percent, which now means that growth during the 12 months ending Q4 of 2018 was only 2.5 percent, not 3 percent as previously thought. This means that the U.S. economy has now gone 14 years without a year-over-year growth of 3 percent.  It’s been 19 years since we’ve hit 4 percent, which was during 1997-2000.

While the numbers don’t portend a coming recession, it is highly unusual for us to go for 16 consecutive months with unemployment below 4 percent and 43 months below 5 percent, yet never attain 3 or 4 percent annual GDP growth. In fact, that has never happened before. During the late 1990s, the unemployment rate ranged from 5.3 percent to 3.9 percent – not even as good as today’s 3.7 percent – yet GDP growth was over 4 percent. Ditto for the late 1960s, when we saw years of 6 percent growth. During the mid 1980s, we saw this growth even with higher unemployment rates.

The debt is not just a problem for future generations in terms of a fiscal cost that will be borne by taxpayers. The exclusive focus on the future is what has fostered the Louis XV mentality of “after me, the deluge.” Let’s face it, we are a nation that doesn’t care about the future of our children. What is missing from the discussion is that the debt is permanently weighing down economic growth now.

The Republican-controlled federal government is setting new records for blowing out the national debt, and substantial spending cuts don’t appear anywhere on the outgoing Congress’ radar. This week the government released two different statistics showing how rapidly the federal deficit is still growing.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office’s monthly budget review for November 2018 found that that the first two months of fiscal year 2019 have yielded a deficit of $303 billion. On Thursday, the latest monthly report from the department of the Treasury showed that the deficit for the month of November 2018 alone was $205 billion — over $66 billion more than the same time last year.

With numbers this high this early in the fiscal year, the federal government will post a trillion-dollar deficit for the first time in its history quite easily before the end of this fiscal year in September, as the Committee for a Responsible Federal Government predicted back in March.

Meanwhile, the national debt clock is still growing, with a total just south of $22 trillion as of Friday morning.

Yet here we are at the end of the year, and you’d be hard-pressed to find any meaningful effort to cut government spending in the upcoming spending package.

Additionally, Republican leadership has even given up on the spending-related agenda items of defunding Planned Parenthood or placing modest work requirement reforms on the federal food stamp program in the nearly $900 billion farm bill that passed this week.

At this point, it appears that the only way congressional leadership might manage to save any taxpayer money in the ongoing year-end spending negotiations is if they fail to negotiate the $5 billion in funds President Trump has demanded for a southern border wall.