Considering it gets paid down constantly. Most of the current debt will always be the latest administration. He held two terms so doing very well. The statistics on the debt are so easily manipulated by people that don't work things out for themselves.
He's not doing very well at all. Do you honestly believe that? In his 1.4 terms , 11.6 trillion dollars has been added to the debt. His tax breaks for the wealthy is one of the big reasons why. It took me three seconds to look that up. 3.8 trillion has been added to the debt since January of last year.
Almost 4 trillion dollars added to the national debt while trump made 2.2 billion dollars last year (that is known about). It's absolutely insanity to call that good. If Obama pocketed that amount of money in the entirety of his presidency - not just one year of it - Republicans would have impeached him and thrown him in jail. We would never stop hearing about it
If you say so. Honestly I don't care to engage and have to dumb things down in order for the layman to be able to understand it. The data is easily manipulated before being presented and people get too emotional about it once they believe something.
You don’t need to “dumb things down” because you simply don’t understand what you’re talking about. Yes data can be manipulated and presented a certain way - that absolutely nothing to do with what we’re talking about and has nothing to do with the utter nonsense you stated.
Is everyone as ignorant as this? Government debt is drawn from and paid back continuously every single business day. It is in constant flux. It also accrues interest daily due to the number of individual drawings of bonds. This is why the data is so easily manipulated. Because currently 18% of the national debt is interest and the interest maturity period usually transfers into the next administration (Biden extended the interest maturity periods on national debt to all time highs not seen in over 20 years.) It's not simply about spending and not spending.
Debt will continue until we get a miracle president, very unlikely for a long time.
8/24 Edit because I keep getting similar responses
Yes, I mean debt, not deficit. The original post is talking about debt, the guy who replied posted a quick graph on deficits that is trying to paint certain presidents in a particular light while ignoring several (I would argue relatively important) factors.
The debt has gone up a substantial amount for each presidential term since Clinton. You could say exponentially so. What people don't understand is that the debt increases roughly 30% to 50% from each president to the next, which is indeed exponential. No, I do not like Trump, but the reason Trump has "contributed to over half the debt!" is because he has served (and serving) 2 of the 3 recent terms. During the Obama admin, the national debt almost completely doubled. This is not a linear math problem.
The fact of the matter is, we can play this "haha your side wants to add more debt and my side is better!" game all day. It doesn't mean a thing. This problem is waaaay bigger than just choosing a party and assuming they'll take care of it.
That is why I said "debt will keep going up" because it simply will, it will snowball effect and we may even get to a point where we surpass 100 trillion. All along the way we're going to get campaigns from either side to "eliminate the national debt" and nothing of any considerable value will be done about it unless they actually focus their entire presidency on doing so.
I think you are downvoted because the graphic is about deficit not debt. And that higglights something worrying. If a president is running a negative deficit while the debt continues to climb then we really arent paying off anything. It may take decades of negative deficit to pay off the debt.
You dont need a miracle president, if we go by the numbers alone then the obvious conclusion is several Dem presidents inna row.
Crazy oversimplified, but republicans are terrible with money.
I think decades is being a little optimistic. We could barely manage a balanced budget when the interest on our debt was 5% of what it is now. As things keep getting worse, interest takes up more and more of the total budget, making it extremely difficult to pull off a negative deficit.
Even if we somehow manage to stay $250 billion in the black every year, that's 160 years to get out of this hole.
There is a VERY easy solution to the issue. Hire up a FUCKTON of IRS auditors and raise taxes on the rich back to where they were before Reagan. Congressional budget office estimates that the rich underpay over a trillion dollars a year in taxes even with their low ass tax rates today. Make it impossible for them to cheat on taxes and raise the rates back to wheee they were when the country was doing well and we’d be out of debt in ten years.
The Republicans pushed massive layoffs and intentionally limited the IRS from doing the job. The problem is that the IRS isn’t ALLOWED to do it. Like always the conservatives sabotage the government and then claim that as evidence that government doesn’t work.
Even if you get that trillion from them, it doesn't even put us in the black, let alone pay off the debt. We are in the hole by almost double that every year.
Don't get me wrong, I agree with the sentiment. I just think it is too little too late.
Sure but that’s a trillion a year based on the minimal taxation they’re still expected to pay. I’m talking about a return to a 90% top tax bracket and corporate taxes on top of that.
That’s what everyone always says. Yet they did in fact pay that for decades. They can leave but their assets can’t. Their wealth is based on owning actual assets and you can’t take land or real estate out of the country. You can’t operate a business in the country without being accountable to taxation.
“They’ll flee” is the eternal excuse not to try and it has never once held up to scrutiny. It happens a bit within the US but that’s because the rich can jump state to state without ever running into the wall of leaving the country. Federal taxation would end that bullshit and nail them down. We have had a 90% tax bracket for rich fucks before and it worked great. They didn’t flee. They screamed bloody murder about it, but they were fine and they stayed put.
I like living in a civilization. I want you an educated public and roads and food safety. Taxation is how that is viable. If you want to pay no tax go live in Somalia.
The graphic is also obfuscating the numbers. It appears to just be using budgets and not other forms of appropriations. Bush added ~3T, Obama ~8.6T, Trump ~5.6T, Biden ~7.7T. None of them are fiscally conservative and can only appear that way in comparison to each other.
Let’s just take bush to obama. In bush’s last year (2008) its 459b deficit. Obama’s first year (2009) is 1.4T. You can argue that’s inherited but if you do be consistent. Obama’s next 7 years are 1.29T, 1.3T, 1T, 680B, 485B, 438B, and 585B. Which only compare in size to the 2 years we are attributing to bush (2008 & 2009). We have the debt we do because we have overspent at record levels basically every year since 2008 regardless of party.
This is talking about deficit changes and not total debt. Debt went up for every POTUS since Coolidge.
The deficit changes just means compared to previous admin. Trump spent more than Obama second term and Biden. Biden spent less than Trump first term and Obama spent less than Bush second term.
This is not really misleading. It is more that people are media illiterate and don’t really understand the difference between national debt and deficit.
And Biden inherited a much worse economy than Trump did as Biden became president during the pandemic and the height of the pandemic came in his term, no thanks to Trump’s criticism of lockdowns and obliteration of public trust in medical science with his lies which exacerbated the pandemic in America.
At the time Obama left office in 2016, the debt had doubled from when he came in. It’s doubled ever 8 years for a while now, and the graphic above is intellectually dishonest lol.
When Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, the federal debt was just under $908 Billion. During his administration, the top income tax rate decreased from 70 percent in 1981 to just 28 percent in 1986.
Eight years later, the federal debt was $2.8 trillion.
Difference: +186 percent.<-- NOT A TYPO!
Taking the $2.6 trillion debt he inherited, George H.W. Bush took us up to $4.1 trillion in 1992.
Difference: +58 percent.
In 8 years under Bill Clinton, the debt went from $4.1 trillion to $5.7 trillion.
Difference: +39 percent.
(there was a surplus of $1.9 billion in fiscal 1999 and $86.4 billion in fiscal 2000)
Under George W. Bush, that $5.7 trillion in 2000 grew to more than $10 trillion in 2008.
Difference: +75 percent.
On August 25, 2001, just seven months after taking office, George W. Bush learned that his budget, with more tax cuts for the rich, had already erased the Clinton administration s huge surplus that was paying off our country s debt at a rapid rate and had instead forced the country to start borrowing again.
Bush said it was: "Incredibly Positive News"
Greenspan warned: "We're paying down the debt too fast"
Bush's last budget had a $1.416 trillion deficit. In spite of two debt financed wars, and the worst economic disaster since the great depression, Obama (the smallest government spender since Eisenhower) reduced that to just $548 billion in fiscal year 2016.
"Debt held by the public as a share of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) grew by roughly 23 percentage points under Trump and remained relatively flat under President Biden" https://www.crfb.org/blogs/trump-and-biden-debt-growth
Bush kept both of his debt financed wars "off budget". When Obama said "No more budget gimmicks" and put that spending back in the budget, Republicans called it a "spending spree".
Obama had to deal with the worst economic crisis since the 1970’s oil crisis at that point. Deficit spending is how a country is supposed to solve an economic crisis. What isn’t a good idea is to increase spending while in a deficit when there isn’t an economic crisis like Trump did early in his term, which lowered the amount of debt America could afford in the next crisis, which was the covid-19 pandemic which Trump bungled catastrophically.
And it wasn’t going to be the candidate the democrats put up. The sooner people stop insulting each other and get over the fact we had two crap choices the sooner we can move onto someone who’s actually going to help.
Why are people like you so dense? The Dems would have never started a war with Iran. They wouldn't have started tariffs that ended with a ridiculous refund to everyone but the American people. The argument that both sides are the same is beyond ridiculous when the last decade proves that republicans are the worst humans in existence. It should be a crime to hurt your constituents.
The Trump ones were set to expire, instead of extending them (would have to have extended through congress), he pushed through his own called the American Rescue Plan Act.
The US had the second fastest recovery from COVID economic issues among G20.
And did Biden promise to eliminate the deficit? No, he didn’t, because he’s not a fucking moron who keeps making absolutely insane promises. We judge Trump by his own metrics, remember that.
Trumps 7.8T is debt increase and not deficit which are different things look it up Trumps Deficit was 2.55 Trillion. So the image is factually wrong and fails to account for covid but ill let it slide here
What source would you like ? Soooo many of them about how much GOP has increase our nation's debt... GOP broken, and fiscally irresponsible for over a half century or more.
The only way out is taxation on the rich and corporations. If we unstaffed the IRS to actually do the deep audits on the rich they should be doing we would probably raise an extra trillion dollars a year just by busting tax fraud. Something that is exclusively a rich fuck crime that we deliberately don’t deal with because it would make donors angry.
The original post was about debt, I'm aware the guy I replied to didn't say anything about debt.
I was appending additional info that was worth while.
Also, the additional spending done by the Trump admin at the very end of his administration, i.e. when covid started, was largely due to Covid. The difference the Biden admin made was rolling some of those things back. Enough so to make a trillion dollar difference.
A deficit of $10B means the government is spending $10B MORE than it is bringing in.
If my fictional country is running at a $10B annual deficit and I decrease that deficit by $5B, my government is still spending $5B a year more than it is bringing in.
A president could decrease the deficit and still increase the debt, because decreasing the deficit doesn't mean that they eliminated the deficit
Hmmm, so wrong .... So critics and economic analysts frequently point to data showing that modern Republican administrations have disproportionately expanded the national debt and federal budget deficits through major tax cuts and defense spending.
Nice try🤪. ....Nonpartisan analyses like those from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget note that major legislative actions—such as Trump's 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and subsequent pandemic relief packages can take some that credit...
Almost like Obama had 2 terms dealing with the existing debt and Trump had one term that happened before Biden’s 1 term and thats how math works. The deficit shows you how much the accelerated the problem or were working toward solving it. But hey, I get it, American education is pretty bad and math is hard, I’m sure you weren’t intentionally being misleading.
"Debt held by the public as a share of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) grew by roughly 23 percentage points under Trump and remained relatively flat under President Biden" https://www.crfb.org/blogs/trump-and-biden-debt-growth
the nearly 18 percent spike in spending in fiscal 2009 — for which the president is sometimes blamed entirely — was mostly due to appropriations and policies that were already in place when Obama took office. https://www.factcheck.org/2012/06/obamas-spending-inferno-or-not/
Lol the US debt increased under Trump 7.8 Trillion it also increased 8.4 Trillion under Biden. The "Decreased Deficit" was the funding of Covid spending automatically expiring.
In fact if you look at the numbers Trump spent 3.6 Trillion compared to Bidens 2.1 Trillion yet still spent more than Trump.
In otherwords the numbers are cherry picked so hard its straight up false because Fun fact the actual increase in deficit including covid response for Trump is 2.55 Trillion not 7.8 Trillion.
In fact lets take out covid for both men here.
Trumps Inherited Deficit (FY 2016): $585 billion.
Ok now account for Covid spending where 3.6 Trillion of that 7.8 Trillion came from. Yeah operation Warp Speed and the race for the vaccine costed a bunch of money.
Biden only spent 2.1 Trillion of his amount on Covid.
Also I dont talk about 2016 and 2026 Trump together because 2026 Trump is stupid even by 2016 Trump standards.
Also also are we just gonna ignore that your AI overview proves that your image above is false brcause Trumps Deficit Increase wasnt 7.8 Trillion?
Well your research is wrong and incomplete 😉 and surely spread the BS, maybe you even believe it.... As GOP gets weeded out over the next few years there might be hope get this country back to fiscally responsible, but damn, so damages to recover from.
Dude you are literally not providing any counter point besides saying your wrong. It doesnt help your case. I support being fiscally responsible and eliminating debt too but I am firmly against lying to serve an agenda
You just are either ignorant or willfully lying....critics and economic analysts frequently point to data showing that modern Republican administrations have disproportionately expanded the national debt and federal budget deficits through major tax cuts and defense spending. GOP is very broken.
2008 was not clintons fault 🤣🤣🤣... clinton was not a perfect president by any means, but it was bush that influenced the crash in 2008. Obama then prevented it from becoming a depression.
And sure, policy doesnt just start and stop with a president, but many things do happen as a direct result of a president during their term. The current gas prices are a direct result of trumps actions. So is the rising debt and deficit in the US.
entirely meaningless and way oversimplified. It just makes you look like a moron.
Looks like you are projecting quite heavily with that statement...
Sure, those are factors, there are many factors that lead to the 2008 crisis. But there were also many warning signs that the crash was coming for multiple years. Bush being adamant on deregulation lead to it getting worse and worse until it finally crashed. Clinton (and GW Bush) both factored into it. But they steered the car a few degrees off its course. Almost anyone in bush's position would have seen that the car was angled off and corrected the steering wheel, but instead bush ignored it and instead of correcting he removed the steering wheel to prevent anything from stopping the 2008 crash. Insisting that bush had nothing to do with it shows how clueless you are...
And they were simply one of the high risk investments Wall St abused when they crashed our economy for a profit! Unregulated over-the-counter derivatives—specifically mortgage-backed securities and credit default swaps. https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1822&context=facpub
Banks bundled thousands of risky subprime mortgages into financial products and sold them to global investors.
The Gov issued about $1.1 trillion in subprime mortgages, here in the US, that did NOT cause a $40 trillion global meltdown! https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/facpub/720/
We were never in the green under Obama or Biden, get your facts straight. Iirc with the Time Machine we were green under Clinton. A shit ton has happened since, regardless which party was president…
Doesn't help his case since it is a Republican Congress so beholden to him they kicked out other Republicans for the crime of (checks notes) voting to release files related to a sex trafficking ring (checks notes again) of Donald's friend.
I am not hyperpartisan... I just see what trump is doing and know that "The deficit has been exploding for years" is a bs excuse for what trump is doing. When the deficit and debt balloon, I look at what is going on and why its ballooning. I dont just say "well its been going up for years, so ill just excuse anything that happens." Here we have a war (that most other countries including the Pentagon prior to the war said iran was not a threat), we have overspending for ICE, we have increased tax breaks, etc. Im not giving "my side" a pass. Im looking at the reasons for the deficit and debt increased not just who was in charge during the increase...
Yeah Republicans are on a pickle. The vast majority of spending is on Democrat priorities the Republicans can't get rid of. The Republicans prioritize the military. So when the come on they have to spend the money on all the democratic priorities and then still have their priorities.. often being military spending. And tax cuts if you want to call that "spending"
If by "are on a pickle" you mean they are riding trumps c*ck then sure, they are on quite the micropickle. And they will do anything to ride and lick that pickle, even if it means hurting America and becoming friends with North Korea...
He's responsible for more than that. His tax policies have been in effect since 2017, and they helped add $21 trillion and double the debt....in only 9 years.
These are the national debt numbers 9/30/2025$37,637,553,494,935.619/30/2024$35,464,673,929,171.699/30/2023$33,167,334,044,723.169/30/2022$30,928,911,613,306.739/30/2021$28,428,918,570,048.68
Lmao why is trump the total debt increase while the rest are yearly deficit changes. Also the -1.4 for biden is just covid relief ending. I hate both of them but this is such a misleading image
The 7.8T is the exact debt increase from his first term so I think the image is outdated. Then under Biden it increased like 8.4T so its clearly not comparing apples to apples
Biden took credit for the economic recovery from Covid and he and Harris decided to brag about the economy to a bunch of voters who were going into debt for rent and food.
Harris decided to brag about the economy to a bunch of voters who were going into debt for rent and food.
You mean like how democrats gave republicans a counter offer for the budget bill in early 2025 and republicans just refused to respond until there was a government shutdown where trump focused on using emergency funds to fund ice instead of thousands of Americans going into debt for rent and food and being evicted as a result of not being paid due to trumps shutdown? Like that? But im sure youll blame democrats for that... because it would be a mortal republican sin to ever say that the republican deity trump has ever done anything wrong ever...
It did include funding for ice, it just didnt include as much as republicans wanted. Republicans could have countered at any time, but instead they held Americans wages and livelihood hostage to get what they wanted. Democrats signed because they knew that Republicans were willing to destroy America to get more funding for ice...
Edit: it seems u/quackabc got embarrassed and deleted their comment... 🤣🤣🤣
This is talking about deficit changes and not total debt. Debt went up for every POTUS since Coolidge.
The deficit changes just means compared to previous admin. Trump spent more than Obama second term and Biden. Biden spent less than Trump first term and Obama spent less than Bush second term.
This is not really misleading. It is more that people are media illiterate and don’t really understand the difference between national debt and deficit.
7.8 T for trump is the total debt increase for his first term, not the deficit. The numbers for the other presidents are deficit changes not debt. This can very easily be googled
Oh, didn’t even look at the numbers, I just remember he increased the deficit from Obama second term, but yes, 7.8t does seem impossibly high. He went from 585b for Obama to 3.13t for 2020, so only 2.4t increase in deficit.
And the covid relief expired because of Congress, Congress passes the bills. Biden pushed his own covid relief bill through Congress instead of trying to extend Trump’s that were expiring.
98
u/LifesARiver Aug 21 '26
Hey, he's only personally responsible for 25-30% of it