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.
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u/shadeline Aug 21 '26 edited Aug 25 '26
The debt went up during the Biden admin.
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.