Like every patriotic American, I have been setting up the bleachers for the Great Announcement of the Deficit 2020 which will occur on the 8th business day of October and will be published on usgovernmentspending.com the same day.

But then I thought: why wait? We have the federal finances for August. Why not just estimate September and get out ahead of the crowd of fake news? The way things are going I doubt that Trump n’Chuck n’Nancy will have another trillion in COVID relief checks in the mail before October 1.

If you look at my COVID-19 page, you will see that all the COVID spending and borrowing and money printing took place back in April, May, and June. Since then federal finances have got back to normal. So, if we take the September finances for last year and apply a highly sophisticated fudge factor, we should have a pretty good idea of what things will look like on October 12.

So here’s the FY 2020 Federal Deficit: $2.91 trillion:

Here’s the FY 2020 Federal Debt: $26.79 trillion:

And here’s the FY 2020 Federal Spending: $6.37 trillion:

Yep. It used to be that with a billion here and a billion there, you were talking about real money. Obviously, that is not true anymore. We are living in the Age of Trillions now.

If you are thinking: Oh No! It’s the End of the World! I should tell you that the federal debt was bigger in 1946 at the end of World War II as a percent of GDP. So, we Yanks can completely turn the federal budget upside down for COVID and still live to see another day.

Here’s the aftermath of World War II. Our brave leaders took the Federal Debt down from 119 percent of GDP in 1946 to 31 percent of GDP in 1972. Since then, not so much.

This is a very interesting chart to me. I would say that the US post-WWII economic policy is one of the wonders of the world, because of what did not happen. There was no nasty inflation; there was no nasty deflation; there was no mass unemployment; there was no riot and revolution. And yet our brave leaders brought the federal debt down by 74 percent as a percent of GDP. How come? And how come you never read about all that, except about the wonderful GI Bill that kept the returning soldiers out of the labor market for a year or two? How come the fashionista women of color at the New York Times are not fashionably interested in that and writing all about the “1945 Project?”

Today, I’d say, looking at the Federal Debt, that we’ve gone about as far as we can go. I think it would be a Very Good Thing to bring the debt from the present 110 percent of GDP back down to about 50 percent of GDP. If we did that, over about a generation, as we did after World War II, then we would be in good fiscal shape in case we were forced to teach the Chinese Communist Party a lesson or perhaps rebuild California after it burned to a crisp in the summer forest fires of 2043.

But you will notice that our Democratic friends have no such ideas. They plan to put the economy on a war footing to slay the dragon of climate change, and while they are doing it, nationalize the healthcare system with Medicare For All. Starting with debt over 100 percent of GDP.

Think about it. Back in the post-WWII era America brought its federal debt down by 74 percent and built the freeways and Saw the USA in Its Chevrolet and built the suburbs that curdled the whey of feminist Betty Friedan.

Today our Democratic friends want to bend the entire people of the Earth and the economy of the U.S. to battle the giants that are rumbling in the depths of the scientists’ climate models. Jolly good fun if you are a scientist with a giga-computer or a Green Energy Czar swinging the mighty spear of 10,000 wind turbines and sacrificing birds to the climate gods as priests like to do.

Plus they want to defend the monument of Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the last fetus, and defeat the Republican Party forever with statehood for D.C. and Puerto Rico and abolition of the Electoral College.

I wonder what their problem is?

I will tell you. The Democrats have succumbed to the disease that threatens to infect every ruling class: to turn governing into an organized loot and plunder operation and to turn moral leadership into a moral reign of terror. Neither of these novel viruses, experts will one day agree, leads to long-term peace and tranquillity in the body politic.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.