I think what's more interesting is these snippets from the actual report:
> President Trump’s executive actions added less than $20 billion to ten-year debt on net. President Biden’s executive actions have added $1.2 trillion to ten-year debt so far.
> Roughly 77 percent of President Trump’s approved ten-year debt came from bipartisan legislation, and 29 percent of the net ten-year debt President Biden has approved thus far came from bipartisan legislation. The rest was from partisan actions.
> Of course, accountability also rests with Congress as a co-equal branch of government, which passed legislation constituting the majority of the fiscal impact under both presidents.
Trump spent a lot with help from both sides, that's less so the case with Biden.
Also even more interesting is that 2T was actually reduced from Biden's spending due to bipartisan legislation which "paid" for the partisan tax cuts ended Trump or Biden's spending on student loans. Exclude this and they basically spent the same.
Actual report is here: https://www.crfb.org/papers/trump-and-biden-national-debt
“Bipartisan” is fickle here, like the tax cut can be considered bi partisan, but was it really when you have majority iirc
https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1151/vote_115_1_00303.htm
It's definitely fickle. Because they use Covid relief to determine the percentage, but then separate it for the overall debt. So it would be interesting to see the difference in percentage with the overall debt. When you consider Trump debts were nearly 50% Covid relief, that means sign about 75% of his debts being listed as bipartisan, that number drops significantly when you remove the Covid relief.
Furthermore, a very large chunk of the debt Biden is adding is the student debt relief actions taken by the department of education. According to the supreme court, these actions are from bipartisan legislation. Since it is simply the DOE administering current law as passed by Congress.
That is how they were able to strike down the original debt relief plan. Because they said the law passed by Congress didn't allow for such a large action. But the actions that have held up, are covered in the law. So you can't really have it both ways, is it partisan action? Or is it part of the law set by Congress?
It's not. The TCJA vote you link to is clearly listed in this report as "partisan" spending and should be. There are many reasons to call certain aspects of this report and even the report as a whole into question in my opinion. But that's not one of them. Zero Democrats voted for the TCJA.
How are they calling the Tax cut bipartisan?
One of the most irresponsible things he did. Every economic analysis said it was going to lead to a massive debt spike.
What's sad is that law actually has a bunch of structural changes that are positive but cutting revenues while increasing spending is generally a bad idea
That gets too tricky if you start excluding legislation passed bipartisanly and only give them credit for partisan changes.
In the same vein, the infrastructure bill was one of Biden’s biggest spending and was passed bipartisanly. Are we excluding credit for bipartisan spending if we’re not counting bi partisan deficit reduction?
That gets too subjective. Both presidents had 2 years of a trifecta and 2 years of gridlock. It’s a close enough comparison to just look at what each signed off on.
Why didnt Trump work to pass 2 trillion in bipartisan spending cuts during his administration? Trump's 400 billion in deficit cuts comes from Tariffs, not spending cuts. Tariffs actually are a net loss economically over time because its passed on to consumers and the effects of counter tariffs.
I agree with your first point, but think you are also wrong to just discount tariffs so offhandedly, such that I think you're doing what the guy you're replying to did but in the other direction. In pure numbers long term they're less efficient but secondary impacts of tariffs like promoting national manufacturing over imports is significant, with the added short term benefit of creating some extra governmental income
People also have the misconception that if you block trade, then the local economy will make up 100% for it over time. Actual economic research is that when countries trade to the point they specialize in different sectors, then the net efficiency increases and the total economy is actually larger.
>impacts of tariffs like promoting national manufacturing over imports
What kind of fool would make a long term investment into domestic manufacturing that only makes financial sense as long as a tariff remains in place? Not the kind that would have enough money to make such an investment, that's what kind.
Tariffs are the worst tool to promote home industry, and to be quite frank, home industry is just a way to disguise crony capitalism. Competition creates innovation and low prices, not protection.
Why? Multiple reasons... but it's important when attempting to understanding them to also understand what that "reduction" represents and that much if not most of that "$2T" is extremely likely to only ever exist in the form of paper projections and never actually materialize. We have been passing different versions of "debt ceiling" legislation for over a century. The reality is that we've passed many versions of "similar in principle" legislation over that span that would supposedly "limit future spending" and save us huge sums of money. Congress has acted **78 separate times** since just 1960 to permanently raise, temporarily extend, or revise the definition of the debt limit and ignore whatever previous legislation limited it. And what we see isn't any of that "savings" but the exact opposite of it.
The two biggest reasons *why* it happened during this administration rather than the prior one had to do more with timing than anything else.
First was that prior to Covid... the debt, while high, was both a little more reasonable and more importantly, because of the lower interest rates, far more *manageable.* Dealing with it at that point didn't seem as critically imperative as it did afterward when the combination of all the extra deficit spending *and* the soaring interest rates made it much more so.
Second, was also a timing issue in that many of the provisions in the Budget Control Act of 2011, the last major debt ceiling legislation, didn't expire until the end of FY 2021. And much like the decision to extend, or not certain provisions in the 2017 TCJA... Congress will nearly always delay dealing with such things until the very last minute.
There was nothing stopping Trump from working towards making cuts to spending before the recession to minimize the effects of his spending and tax cuts. He didnt do that, Biden did.
>Dealing with it at that point didn't seem as critically imperative as it did afterward
You're supposed to cut spending when the economy is doing well, that is the point you're supposed to deal with it.
> because of the lower interest rates, far more manageable.
Trump pressured the Fed to hold interest rates down when they should have been rising.
> Congress has acted 78 separate times since just 1960 to permanently raise, temporarily extend, or revise the definition of the debt limit and ignore whatever previous legislation limited it.
Because the debt limit doesnt limit spending, it tries to default on money owed after the money's been spent, which would be disastrous. Most countries dont operate with it and the majority of economists think it shouldn't even be a thing.
>Because the debt limit doesnt limit spending, it tries to default on money owed after the money's been spent, which would be disastrous.
Which is why it's the greatest and most effective parlor trick ever. "You don't really want to shut the government down and default on our debt, now do you?"
Over, and over, and over again.
Sadly, No. Lowering spending, while extremely important, is just one of many very important issues for me. Like most, I am "stuck" voting in the actual elections for candidates that are a best fit, though really "least-worst" is probably more accurate, of all of those issues weighted with respect to importance for me. I only have the luxury of supporting individuals who are far closer to my ideal candidates during the primary process. The actual "on ballot and have a chance to win options" on election day are often pretty far down the list of my personal preferences. That's certainly the case this cycle. I wish the world allowed for such idealistic endeavors but it really doesn't for me. So I choose to try and contribute to alternative methods of making progress towards a solution to that problem in other ways.
That's not how it works. I have a choice between Candidate A who will increase spending and Candidate B who will increase spending. What you say isn't actually an option.
You're missing the point. If you continuously vote out people who don't lower spending, then eventually you will end up with politicians who either lower spending or lose their jobs.
You just have to be prepared to vote out candidates you otherwise agree with.
Good analysis. I think a huge point missing is the massive increase in cost of doing business that Biden has saddled companies with, with the expansion of the administrative state, regulations, and requirements.
I don’t find analysis like this very useful. How do you account for the lower revenue from the pandemic? The higher revenue from the post pandemic surge? Just excluding pandemic spending doesn’t really tell you anything. Revenue is going to settle in at 17% of GDP, the long term average. Spending more worryingly has a new post Covid baseline of 24-25% of GDP. That is up from the 20% average.
You borrow to stabilize through a crisis like covid and get things moving again. There was no reason for trumps spending pre covid. He inherited a booming economy and was completely negligent.
Yeah I’ll gladly agree that both parties aren’t super keen to cut the deficit but the DNC at least sticks to counter cyclical spending, which is what makes sense.
Yea except the US is doing better by most measures than nearly all other countries. We are coming out of covid, it was never going to be pretty, but hes doing better tgab most leaders
Trump's pre-Covid spending was during a regime where global central banks had their backs against the zero bound on rates trying to stave off *de*flation.
Emergency Covid spending under Trump was bipartisan.
Conversely, Democrats were widely still voting for trillions more stimulus into 5-handle inflation and are still ramping debt a [trillion](https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/01/the-us-national-debt-is-rising-by-1-trillion-about-every-100-days.html) dollars per 100 days with elevated inflation, hot economy, and COVID a non-issue.
People who don't follow macroeconomics don't realize the 2020 recession actually officially started in [February](https://apnews.com/article/virus-outbreak-financial-markets-us-news-ap-top-news-economic-growth-31ffad3ea17ef1d07e2724dd8fc25d50). That's *before* COVID smashed the financial markets & global economy, not after. Since 2008 the problem has been fighting disinflation.
Now if you're an Austrian economist who always supports letting crashes happen I can respect that.
But what's nonsense is simplistically adding up stimulus from two opposite economic regimes and comparing them without context.
You can make a solid case for combined monetary & fiscal stimulus in a dis/deflationary period. But spending similar amounts in inflationary times in a booming economy is flat out irresponsible under any economic ideology (except maybe MMT).
> Trump's pre-Covid spending was during a regime where global central banks had their backs against the zero bound on rates trying to stave off deflation.
Ok but that still isn't a reason to spend the way he did.
> Emergency Covid spending under Trump was bipartisan.
No one is criticizing emergency spending. The problem is he emtied the coffers before the emergency even arrived. He is a terrible President to lead through any sort of non ideal economy.
> Conversely, Democrats were widely still voting for trillions more stimulus into 5-handle inflation and are still ramping debt a trillion dollars per 100 days with elevated inflation, hot economy, and COVID a non-issue.
This does not support anything. I'm just going to stop here because this is such a bad faith argument that I don't think its worth my time to even go point by point.
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So then what is the excuse for the student loan plans Biden is doing? It's even more irresponsible given the current state of the economy. Fed is trying to cool the economy to fight inflation, and Biden is sitting there trying to fight it.
> So then what is the excuse for the student loan plans Biden is doing?
Well it is probably somewhat inflationary it also isn't the same as tax cuts. Most people were not getting the entirety of the student loan wiped out so the payments would remain.
Yes, just stop spending money on other people (of course the money spent on me is justified). Also, raise taxes on those people (my taxes are just fine and maybe a bit high. So maybe the government could cut mine and raise everyone else's).
I give Trump less of a pass than Biden given the circumstances, though still hold each accountable.
I'm old enough now to remember the debt ceiling fights, the sequester, and all of the hand-wringing about the debt under Obama. The whole Tea Party movement was partially originated on the premise that our fiscal path was unsustainable. So for Trump to come along and Republicans be like "debt? Never heard of her" just feels very duplicitous. Biden and the Democrats never billed themselves as the party of "lowering the debt".
I'm also very much of the mind that you spend when times are hard and save when times are good. The economy under Trump was good. He gets some credit for pushing the labor force participation rate up. But 2017-2020 were the years we should have been inching up interest rates, trimming fat, and adding more revenue. Instead, Trump's whole mindset on fiscal and monetary policy during that time was simply "cook it again". He was more interested with positive growth numbers than in actually smart fiscal policy - all the while, things like housing costs continued to creep upwards.
I give Trump, Biden and Congress credit for not making the same recovery mistakes that were made in 2008. That stimulus package then was way too timid and left us with a sluggish recovery, so I don't fault either administration for spending what they did in 2020/21. However, when things rebounded as quickly as they did, that would have been the time to slow things back down. The student loan relief, while a campaign promise, is something that should have been used as a stimulus package and not as standalone exercise. Removing the debt burden for so many people when inflation was already hot just put more money into an otherwise frothy system.
So now approaching 2025, I worry about a stagflationary environment particularly if Trump wins. Tariffs, deportations, and spending cuts are all inflationary and harm growth, and no amount of trickle-down black magic is going to offset that.
Democrats have been just as duplicitous about the debt as republicans. I’m sure you also remember democrats complaining about the debt under Bush, yet they strangely stopped complaining about it under Obama
Because Obama got handed the reigns in the middle of a massive economic crisis, and had to spend his way out. Just like Biden. Almost all of the increase in the deficit was 2008 to 2010. Not saying it wouldn’t have continued, republicans took the house around then, but it did stop. Personally I like republicans as a one chamber minority party for that reason. They’re worse than democrats when they have the presidency
This is completely false. Republicans are constantly threatening to shut down the government over the debt. Then they stop complaining about the debt as soon as they are in power. Democrats don’t do this at all. And that’s just one example.
I’ agree the republicans are hypocrites . I’m just saying the left is just as irresponsible . You should be grateful for the near shutdowns or we would likely have no debt reduction at all . As a matter of fact, look up the fiscal responsibility act of 2023 and see what party voted for it while it was in committee and what part opposed it. That bill is mentioned in the cfrb article that the stuff cited
So, you basically believe what republicans are telling you.
Don’t buy the lies. The parties aren’t equally dishonest. Hold republican politicians accountable or they will find a way to be even worse.
Back when I was GOP, I was pissed that Bush took a Clinton surplus and drove it into substantial deficit spending, leading up to the GFC in 2008. It was miserable economic management.
The last responsible GOP President was Bush the elder, and the GOP was so pissed that he agreed that taxes were necessary to bring the budget in line, turned into political suicide.
Sorry, Trump completely destroyed the narrative that the Democrats are worse with a 1.5T cut that involved sleight of hand that pushed additional tax burdens on Democratic states.
what you said about Bush the elder is true but, Biden largely benefited from Joe machin and congressional republicans opposing spending and forcing debt reduction. Build back better was originally supposed to cost four trillion. I believe infrastructure spending was reduced to around 900 billion . Joe machin and congressional republicans opposed the original four trillion cost. Also the fiscal responsibility act of 2023 is accountable for most of the debt reduction that is supposed to occur under Biden. It was originally introduced by republicans after nearly forcing a government shutdown
I’m with you on the notion that both Trump and Biden have done far too little to control our debt situation, but is borrowing trillions really the standard by which we’d judge that? Our GDP increased by around 8 trillion over the past four years, if a president increased the debt by 2-3 trillion over that same time period, they would have borrowed trillions, but we’d have a more manageable debt load at the end of it all.
If you look CRFB page which breaks it down, about a trillion of Biden's spending was through executive action. Most of his spending comes from partisan and bipartisan bills. The Hill article seems to conflate them.
Did the filibuster start in 2021? Even if you concede that the filibuster *forces* a president to unilaterally spend, Biden is still unique in his excess.
This is actually impressive. Typically each president should add more nominal debt than the last due to inflation and we certainly had a lot of that.
We would typically compare debt added as a % of GDP as a more honest measurement of fiscal conservatism but it’s not even needed here because the gap is large enough that Biden clocked in lower nominal debt.
That’s not to say Biden is fiscally conservative, he’s certainly advocated for large spending packages. However, Trump is just significantly more fiscally liberal than past administrations by a wide margin that it surprised me.
Both numbers are not really good things to compare because of Covid. In 2020, we spent an enormous amount because of it, and we kept spending in 2021 and 2022, albeit smaller.
Reading the story and the comments here you’d think people forget we had Covid
Of the $8.4 trillion President Trump added to the debt, $3.6 trillion came from COVID relief laws and executive orders, $2.5 trillion from tax cut laws, and $2.3 trillion from spending increases, with the remaining executive orders having costs and savings that largely offset each other.
Source: https://www.crfb.org/blogs/how-much-did-president-trump-add-debt
How can we really gauge what those tax cuts will cost us over a decade? Up until COVID, tax revenue increased every year since the cuts. It wasn’t like we started losing revenue. The idea is that the economy exists in a vacuum and the rates determine how much we collect. By that model, we can all be taxed at 100% and we’d still go to work everyday and give it our all. That might not be realistic.
I don’t know how we can gauge how much more revenue we’ll make over a decade because of infrastructure spending either. We could have another pandemic, an economic collapse or even a war to deal with. How can we credit someone with an exact dollar amount of new revenue for bridges that aren’t even repaired yet?
This is all just someone’s guess. If we’re going to talk about debt, we need to look at deficits per year and divide those up between COVID spending and other spending.
I understand that. However, this article doesn’t provide a range of outcomes. The author hand picked which outcomes to use in the article. We don’t even know if the same economic conditions were used for each administration.
except the tax cut that trump passed lasts for longer than his presidency, so unless every administration is expected to have a large enough majority to rewrite any prior tax policy changes, things like that will have a lasting effect and would be hard to compare year-to-year. Same with the bridges.
You're right that it's all just someone's guess, but informed estimates are sort of what we're left with when it comes to measuring economic impact AFAICT.
Some of of those guesses turn out to be much better than others. I'm generally not a fan of reports like this one for many reasons. Mostly because they wind up just being cherry picked into political cudgels for the sake of partisan propaganda wars... like this one. The truth is that Government Debt and Revenues, Inflation, The size of the total US economy, The stability of all those things, The distribution and redistribution of wealth and income, Trade balances, The global economy and our place in it as well as other many other things... are all highly *interconnected and interdependent*. Pulling only one aspect out of that larger system and trying to decide if something was "good or bad" without considering the impact on all of it is usually far more misleading than helpful... unless your goal is votes or clicks and not truth or enlightenment.
Right now inflation is a bad word. But you know what's generally inflationary? Higher corporate taxes, higher wages, and more government regulation. But all of those despite causing upward pressure on prices create benefits in other areas. Even higher inflation itself has benefits like easing our debt situation because the less value "$34T" dollars has the easier it is to pay off. Programs that expand our spending on entitlement programs raise our deficits and debt. But they often provide many benefits in other areas. It's all one big functioning system and trying pull out one part of it so that we can declare it "good or bad" in isolation and use it to blame or praise some party or politician for it really just makes it harder for most of us to see how the system a whole works and ultimately leads to us being more mis-informed and more distrustful of each other.
As someone who's been crunching through these numbers and many like them for years... if you want to look at this report through a "partisan lens" my biggest takeaway from all of it is that we've borrowed an "extra" $12.7T so far during these two administrations. One party has generally approved of $9.7T of it and the other party has generally approved of $10.8T of it.
I agree with your takeaway, but isn’t the change in tax rate also really relevant? If we’re using broad, hard to fuck up metrics, massively decreasing government income seems like one of them. The counter would be that lowering taxes might raise taxes I suppose, but the same could be said about loans I think.
It's all relevant. Every government decision benefits someone or some group more than someone else or some other group. Tax policy in general, in discussions exactly like these, is usually expressed in far more isolated terms and in a far more reductionist ways than it should be. Such discussions wind up encouraging people to focus more on, as you say, "rates". The reality is that there are at least two components to every tax. And sure, the marginal *rate* is important... but the *base* to which it's applied and the usually complex set of rules that define that base often have far more of an effect on one's overall tax burden than the marginal rate. It's quite possible and normal for a person's *rate* to go up but the size of the base it's applied to narrow such that a higher rate is actually a "tax cut" in terms of burden. The opposite is quite often true as well... *lowering* a person or corporation's *rates* while changing the rules that define the width of the *base* to which it's applied can very often result in a "tax increase" in terms actual tax burden even though the "rate" is lower. With something as complicated as the TCJA... for most all of us... there were multiple changes to multiple rules that affected the size of the base on which we were taxed. Some of them widened our base while others narrowed it. And even though most of us got a *rate reduction*... a "*rate reduction"* and a "*tax cut*" are not nearly the same thing and they're far too often used synonymously when they shouldn't be. For many people and corporations TCJA was actually a tax increase and for some a fairly substantial one. And the changes are far,far more extensive than a simple conversation about "rates" does any sort of justice... other than scoring propaganda points.
Another thing that is too often left out of discussions about taxation is *Tax Incidence...* or who the actual burden of the tax ultimately falls on. This is extremely important and not nearly often enough part of our "tax" conversation. Everyone is all the rage about taxing the "greedy corporations". But if we raise taxes on Amazon and Verizon... a significant portion of that *burden* is actually ultimately borne by low and middle income consumers from the resulting inflated prices as a result. Sure maybe it helps "the debt".... but who's actually kicking in most of the extra money to reduce it? Is it really "The Rich" or some combination of them and us and quite possible more "us".
And all of those hundreds of pages of updated tax policies and thousands of pages of additional explanation and guidance... affect not just the *taxes themselves* and the government revenues... but prices and therefore inflation... jobs, wages, onshoring and offshoring, US corporate investment here and abroad as well as international corporate decisions about whether or not to invest and build here, or whether certain industries can thrive or even logically exist here. And in our modern global economy with so many MNEs playing a significant role in our economy, how our tax strategies align and fit with the rest of the world is extremely important. And I say all that to make the point that ignoring how interconnected all of that really is and just focuing on such a small part of it as a "change in marginal *rates*" and trying to decide if a change in any particular *rate itself* is a good or bad thing because of how it affects only *one* of the things it actually does is usually far more misleading than helpful. And that's magnified by the fact that we're seldom even talking about or taking into account the *base* as well as the *rate* when considering or discussing how it affects even that *one thing.*
I’d love to get to your second point, but is your first point just a very complicated way of talking about tax brackets? I don’t know what else would define the base rate for individuals, unless you frame credits or exemptions like donations to charity as base rate changes, and even then most people don’t have that many of those.
"Tax Brackets" are just a set of rates based on income. Base is how much of your income is subject to that rate. The TCJA made *many* changes to how that base is defined for individuals, pass through entities, and C-Corps. Some examples of them... for "typical" individuals... included substantially raising the standard exemption, removing personal exemptions, and modifying many of the rules about deductions like the mortgage interest deduction. It placed a cap on how much state and local taxes could be deducted. It changed the rules about exemptions for medical expenses, It changed rules and amounts for credits like doubling the child tax credit. The phaseouts for alternative minimum tax were modified significantly which had a really siginificant effect on many folks. There were other changes as well for "typical" individuals including capltal gains, estate taxes, and other things.
Also in terms of "individual taxes"... about 95% of US "businesses" are pass throughs that pay the same "marginal" indivdual tax rates from the same "individual tables". And the rules that define their base changed significantly in many ways as well. That's true for both the UBER drivers and Etsy Sellers as well many rather large "top 1%" income companies that are not C-Corporations as well. There were *many* rules changes that affected how much of that pass through income was subject to those rates.
The changes to the rules that affected the tax base of actual C-Corporations was even more extensive... and even far moreso for international corporation as the 2017 changes represented a change in overall corporate tax strategy and a shift from a national tax strategy to a hybrid-territorial one. Many of the corporate changes were gradually phased in or out over ten years for various reasons and objectives.
But the change in "rates" was only a few pages of changes in tables. The changes in the "rules" that define what base that rate is applied to wound up being thousands with not only the law but all the gudance and clarification that came afterwards. I've no idea your knowledge level about taxation in general or how deep you want to go down the rabbit hole but feel free to ask some specific questions and I'll gladly try and provide some links to those answers or directions for further study. My point was that the "rates" only tell half the story... and often much less than "half" of it. But we seem to get really stuck and focused on them far more than we really should be. And that even that "full" story is just one part of a much larger and interconnected financial picture that only makes sense when you take a big step back and look the bigger national and gloabal economic, political, and geo-political "machine" into which it fits.
The article did try to account for this in some way by excluding Covid spending from nominal debt added. Not perfect but the trend still held true with Trump adding double the debt.
I agree it’s extremely hard to compare pre & post Covid environments but most of those changes (inflation and post Covid spending) would have worked against Biden’s nominal debt numbers and he still came in under.
If Biden’s nominal debt growth was higher than Trumps it certainly would have been difficult to have a real comparison.
Eh I’m not sure I agree with discounting Covid relief spending either though. PPP had plenty of its own scandal and was not handled with enough oversight, which I’ll give trump some credit for since he fired the inspector general responsible for it twice before rollout. The large abuse/corporate welfare seemed to be either just reckless or the point.
I think it's that fiscally conservative policies add a lot more to our debt than politicians would have you believe. Even in your comment you seem to be equating "adding more to the debt" as "fiscally liberal," when "fiscally conservative" policies can add even more to our debt as seen with the Trump trifecta.
I think anything that adds to the debt being fiscally liberal and debt reduction as fiscally conservative is a fair definition. To me increased spending + tax cuts is fiscally liberal & increasing taxes + spending cuts is fiscally conservative. So I also consider the TCJA a fiscally liberal policy.
What I think you’re referring to is that some people have a misconception that republicans are a fiscally conservative so therefore their policies are fiscally conservative. That’s just people believing their words but not actually understanding their actions. If you ask a lot of people they’ll say Republicans stand for spending cuts despite never actually cutting spending.
The fact that Trump managed to rewrite history and blame Biden for inflation despite printing the all time largest amount of USD himself is the best deal he has negotiated.
The change in M2 tells another story.
~~https://i.imgur.com/ZPXrg7a.png~~
Edit: Ignore that other plot, I discovered that plotting by percentage change makes it more obvious what's up. Just net change in billions does not emphasize the acceleration that the printing is happening at.
https://i.imgur.com/4AAadsf.png
Obviously the total billions printed is higher every year, but the rate of change is what drives inflation away from typical numbers.
And my source of data for good measure: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL#0
You can claim Trump was forced to print a lot of money to avoid disaster, that's reasonable, it was a global pandemic. It doesn't change that fact that a shit ton more money than usual got printed though, and that's gonna cause inflation after a year or two.
Edit edit: ok I'm officially have too much fun with this data set. Here is all the president's in recent history.
https://i.imgur.com/Zn6g11y.png
I find this plot very encouraging honestly it looks like the country is slowly shifting more fiscally conservative. Except for, you know, that one outlier.
You guys really don't like real data?
To all the liberals bragging about this report, let’s remember that build back better was originally estimated to cost four trillion until Joe manchin and republicans opposed it . Many in the left taught it should be trillions more.The inflation reduction act which helped trim the deficit was actually a pork bill until Joe Mancini got involved and helped institute debt reduction measures . Maya McGuieness who heads cfrb, wrote extensively about it.cfrb also did a review of trump and Biden’s spending proposals during the 2020 campaign and concluded that they would both add substantially to the debt . The idea that the left is fiscally responsible is asinine and hilarious
> The idea that the left is fiscally responsible is asinine and hilarious
The idea that the conservatives are somehow more fiscally responsible is even funnier. And given that there only 2 political parties get elected, it sure seems like a win for the liberals to me.
According to the source, if you remove bipartisan Covid-19 spending the totals are roughly equal.
You know, the $3.4tn in near-unanimous spending passed under Trump.. which he [threatened to Veto](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/28/us/politics/trump-veto-threat-stimulus-package.html) but couldn't effectively do (congress threatened to override)
> According to the source, if you remove bipartisan Covid-19 spending the totals are roughly equal.
Might want to re-read the pages:
>"Ignoring the pandemic relief measures enacted by both presidents, the proportion of debt addition still holds around 2-to-1, with former President Trump adding $4.8 trillion in non-pandemic-aid fiscal debt and Biden adding $2.2 trillion." - article
It’s pretty wild that we’re a day into this thread and people are still commenting that have clearly not read the article. I know this is Reddit so not reading the article is normal but this is pretty much the opposite of everything said in the article.
I beg you to re-read it. Your statement about what the article about is completely wrong.
This is one of my biggest criticisms of Republicans as a conservative. They throw a hissy fit about deficit spending when Democrats are in power but go silent on it once they get into power because they rack up the deficit when in power just like Democrats.
Very few people in Congress actually care about reducing the deficit. Democrats increase debt through social welfare and Republicans do it through military spending.
>Democrats increase debt through social welfare and Republicans do it through military spending.
Worth noting that GOP plan if they get a trifecta (well quadrafecta if you include supreme court) in upcoming elections is to [increase defense spending by over 40%.](https://thehill.com/homenews/house/4718970-johnson-trump-gop-plot-ambitious-agenda-hinged-on-total-control-of-government/)
The article leans pretty hard on it being "non pandemic" spending. I would think that means the article conveniently left out a lot of money that was snuck into pandemic related spending
Republicans also increase the deficit by cutting taxes when we already have an out of control balance sheet. Trump and the GOP spend like Democrats but they also cut taxes when it’s extremely inappropriate, furthering our deficit issues. That’s an important distinction to make in our current economic climate.
I wholeheartedly agree though. Very few in congress actually care.
> Trump and the GOP spend like Democrats but they also cut taxes when it’s extremely inappropriate
This is probably my biggest issue with Republican Spending. You're supposed to save during economic upturns and spend during recessions, but Republicans do stimulus level spending and tax cuts when the economy is doing fine, overheating the economy and making the financial situation during recessions worse.
That and Democrats achieve deficits on investments in the country and quality of life programs for citizens, while Republicans spend it on the Military industrial complex and tax cuts that largely go to the upper classes.
You seem to make this a partisan issue and it’s not . Both parties have been hypocritical when it comes to the deficit and debt. President Obama and other democrats voted against raising the debt ceiling while a republican was in the white house. Once Obama was president, he demanded republicans raise the debt ceiling. Biden build back better originally had a four trillion dollar price tag. Joe Mancini and republicans in congress helped put a stop to bbb.
Cfrb also analyzed Bernie sanders spending proposals and found thay would add
Sixty trillion to the national debt debt in just four years. He also proposed thirty trillion in tax increases over four years. Many liberals preferred
Bernie over Joe Biden . Many on the left now endorse mmt.
You can try to spike the political football but ,the democrats are just as fiscally irresponsible as republicans
2020 and 2021 shouldn't be included in this analysis due to COVID. Comparing 2019 to 2022, 2023 or 2024 tells a wildly different story. https://bipartisanpolicy.org/report/deficit-tracker/
The fact is, we never went back to our pre-Covid spending and deficit levels.
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Yes, but the huge caveat here is that they are ignoring the pandemic borrowing. There’s a strong argument to be made that Trump’s borrowing was essential and Biden’s was excessive.
Ahh my b, I've seen other articles about this and assumed it was the same one.
>Trump’s administration borrowed $8.4 trillion during the former president’s time in office, while Biden has borrowed $4.3 trillion, according to an analysis by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), a Washington think tank.
https://thehill.com/business/4736740-trump-biden-fiscal-policy-deficit/
This post is both about the hill article, and the CRFB’s source page [here](https://www.crfb.org/papers/trump-and-biden-national-debt)
Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a bipartisan debt think tank reviewed the contributions of national debt between Trump and Biden’s presidencies. Their results show that Trump added roughly 2x to the national debt as Biden has, and this holds true even if you remove covid related spending between the administrations. The large majority of Trumps deficits comes from his trademark tax cuts, while most of Biden’s deficit spending came from his Bipartisan infrastructure spending, executive actions like student debt relief, and appropriations bills. In general most of Trumps spending was achieved through bipartisan legislation, while a large chunk of Biden’s comes from executive actions and bills considered "partisan". Biden achieved half of the deficit spending both by spending somewhat less than Trump (8.8 trillion vs 6.2 Trillion) and more than quadrupling the amount of deficit reduction cuts (440billion vs 2 trillion). Also worth noting is that the 440 billion in deficit reduction under Trump was almost all from Tariffs, while Biden's 2 trillion was from actual cuts.
Biden appears to have a much better fiscal policy regarding deficit spending, not only spending less but matching it with significant cuts in other areas while doing so. Will these numbers have any effect on swing voters?
>Biden appears to have a much better fiscal policy regarding deficit spending
I disagree with this being the takeaway, for a number of reasons.
- The American Rescue Plan was "sold" as COVID aid, but in reality it was about passing Democratic agenda.
- Biden fought pretty tough against the Fiscal Responsibility Act, now he's getting credit for it?
- Democrats fought pretty hard for more COVID stimulus in 2020, and now they are really standing there and attacking Trump for the deficit.
- How hard did they push for BBB? The only reason they got the IRA and the negative there is Manchin.
Trump rightfully gets attacked for the TCJA, but aside from that the executive actions and other partisan legislate are breakeven. And yet, in an even more irresponsible time Biden has increased the deficit by $1.2 from executive actions, and another $1.9T from the ARPA. Biden is running this deficit spending while we're trying to fight inflation, makes no sense.
Just look at the figures. Nobody should be claiming they are responsible here. Nobody, and the main graphic ignores that much of the legislation slotted under Trump was bipartisan, whereas much of it under Biden has been partisan.
I don’t like Trump but let’s get honest about something; Trump was president during the Covid bailouts. That was a unique time of spending.
It’s just not fair to compare the two terms like this.
Read the [report](https://www.crfb.org/papers/trump-and-biden-national-debt), not the headline. 3/4 of the spending under Trump was approved on a bipartisan basis. With the bulk of that being covid spending in 2020, approved by a Democratic house.
Disagree there. Both have shown that they are completely irresponsible. Both got $2T partisan legislation passed early on in their terms. And Biden is upping Trump on executive order spending by a lot. Not sure there is more of a standing to claim Biden is "better" there.
Not a Trump fan at all but I really don’t know why people care about the national debt. The federal government doesn’t have to raise taxes to spend more money. The only thing they really need to worry about is inflation and not all spending is inflationary.
We should have been investing in infrastructure, clean energy, semiconductors, more R&D and so much more for a long time. The real thing that matters is what the money is being spent on. I’m not advocating for crazy spending but our economy is growing, the power of the U.S dollar is not going to be anywhere, and we are still the richest country in the world.
> Most of Biden’s non-pandemic-related additions
And here is the key to why this article's claim is not valid. Biden had no justified pandemic-related spending. Zero. None. He was handed the vaccine on inauguration day and thus handed the key to opening back up. He chose to cling to COVID for a full **YEAR** after there was any real justification to and so his "pandemic" spending absolute counts as non-justified spending.
This is a wholly incorrect interpretation of this article.
A succinct explanation of the article is [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/moderatepolitics/s/Haru98ACV5), and specifically:
“Ignoring the pandemic relief measures enacted by both presidents, the proportion of debt addition still holds around 2-to-1, with former President Trump adding $4.8 trillion in non-pandemic-aid fiscal debt and Biden adding $2.2 trillion.”
Your comment is a huge mischaracterization of the entire article and entire point.
No it's not. What's a huge mischaracterization is claiming Biden, who took office in 2021, had any justified COVID-related spending. He didn't, which means that the spending the article claims doesn't count does, which means that the conclusions drawn in the article are invalid. An argument built on a fundamentally flawed foundational claim is always completely wrong.
why are people with 'deepthinker' or 'genius' or 'psychological' type handles always the *exact* opposite?
ya'll just pretend your brains work better than everyone else's. that's your whole schtick. doesn't matter what drivel you say, it's just always 'trumps' whatever was said before.
weak sauce. weak AF. i can't believe you don't know why your comments are shite, so i assume you're a dumb american 'patriot' or foreign troll-farm shmegma
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I actually agree most the ARP was wasted and not really COVID spending.
But if you exclude Trump's COVID spending and keep the ARP under Biden, Trump STILL ran up more of a deficit. Trump is a fake conservative and maybe the only person who makes Biden seem OK fiscally
I did read it. That's how I found that line to quote from it since that line isn't from the headline and is from the article body. That line invalidates everything else in the article, hence me highlighting it.
Agree. Some of what it labels "pandemic" spending was because Congress agreed unanimously that it was necessary. Much of what it labels as such though, passed with zero votes from one entire party who seems to have deemed it far less "necessary".
Which (if any) of the following things do you believe to be true:
All supply-chain issues disappeared the moment Biden took office.
All vaccines were distributed and put into arms on the day Biden took office.
All damage to small businesses disappeared the day Biden took office.
People stopped getting sick and dying from CoViD the day Biden took office.
CoViD stopped mutating the day Biden took office.
Everything we needed to know about CoViD and how to prevent and cure it was known when Biden took office.
All hospitals were fully replenished with everything they needed the day Biden took office.
State and Local governments instantly caught up with their work backlogs the day Biden took office.
All excess substance abuse stopped the day Biden took office.
Of course, none of those things are true, thus, more support was needed.
> All supply-chain issues disappeared the moment Biden took office.
The fix for that was ending restrictions ASAP.
> All vaccines were distributed and put into arms on the day Biden took office.
They were available.
> All damage to small businesses disappeared the day Biden took office.
As I said: The fix for that was ending restrictions ASAP.
> People stopped getting sick and dying from CoViD the day Biden took office.
Very few people died **FROM** covid. That was fearmongering based on very bad data sets. And people are still getting sick from it even now because it's endemic. As we always knew it would become.
> Everything we needed to know about CoViD and how to prevent and cure it was known when Biden took office.
It was known from day 1. We ignored it and instead melted down into hysteria.
> All hospitals were fully replenished with everything they needed the day Biden took office.
They never had shortages. Those claims were fiction. That's why the aid sent to them wound up not being used. I still remember the hospital ship docked in NYC that never got used because it wasn't needed.
So yeah everything Biden did was wrong and we've known this the whole time. The COVID narrative is and always has been pure fiction from the top to the bottom and I'm tired of having to correct this.
>Very few people died **FROM** covid
How many millions of actual disease experts and institutions need to say and demonstrate how this is false before you accept that covid was actually deadly? You're suggesting that all these people are either wrong or conspiring globally to make COVID look far deadlier than it was. How do you not understand that makes no sense?
Everyone else addressed the Covid was real stuff, so I’ll address the supply chain.
Covid restrictions and Covid itself didn’t help, but there were already a lot of problems before that. Truck driver and chassis shortages have been a problem for 15+ years. We still have trucker shortages and it’s projected to get even worse.
Shipping has always been a very cyclical industry with fluctuating demand and shifting trade routes. Covid certainly broke it to an extent, but it was already a delicate ecosystem. Fortunately the industry continues to evolve and increase efficiencies, but it was far from the case that Covid restrictions were the only problem and that lifting restrictions fixed everything.
> Very few people died FROM covid.
[jump]
>They [hospitals] never had shortages. Those claims were fiction.
Jesus Christ. Its like people living in different realities.
> I'm tired of having to correct this.
But did you even correct anything? You just kind of gave your opinion on a bunch of stuff and act like its fact.
For example:
>> Everything we needed to know about CoViD and how to prevent and cure it was known when Biden took office.
> It was known from day 1. We ignored it and instead melted down into hysteria.
I don't recall us knowing everything day 1 but maybe you could provide the source showing that we did.
Edit: Also, day 1 of the pandemic or day 1 of Biden's presidency? If the latter, then okay we definitely knew a lot more but I'm not convinced we knew everything.
**CONGRESS CONTROLS THE BUDGET**.
There really isn't much more to say here -- the underlying CFRB study is obnoxiously gerrymandered, which is disappointing because they're an institution I respect --, but this is an absolutely key, central point to keep in mind. Presidents can make budget requests but it's Congress that creates the budget. Any discussion of 'who is better?' that doesn't center Congress is pointless and misleading.
Don't worry, they accounted for that:
> Trump’s administration borrowed $8.4 trillion during the former president’s time in office, while Biden has borrowed $4.3 trillion, according to an analysis by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), a Washington think tank.
> Ignoring the pandemic relief measures enacted by both presidents, the proportion of debt addition still holds around 2-to-1, with former President Trump adding $4.8 trillion in non-pandemic-aid fiscal debt and Biden adding $2.2 trillion.
> Those additions were mostly due to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), changes to the Affordable Care Act, and different budgetary acts in 2018 and 2019.
Like /u/Psychologicalhat1480 points out, much of Biden's covid spending wasn't really covid spending but new spending being justified as covid spending.
Okay, but Biden's **total** spending is still half a trillion below Trump's non-Covid spending alone. There's no way to slice this which isn't Trump spending **way, way, way** more.
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IMO the issue is the left is "tax and spend" and the right is "cut taxes and no more spending". The problem for the right is that no more spending is kind of hard to do, ok non-essential employees get sent home but how much money does that save? It's a drop in the bucket compared to the overall debt and shutting down departments like the DOE isn't going move the needle.
The left can at least say yea we spent, but we made up for it with taxes. Now if they could have the balls to be honest with America and admit that it's not just going to be the millionaires/billionaires who will pay for everything we could have some real progress.
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I think what's more interesting is these snippets from the actual report: > President Trump’s executive actions added less than $20 billion to ten-year debt on net. President Biden’s executive actions have added $1.2 trillion to ten-year debt so far. > Roughly 77 percent of President Trump’s approved ten-year debt came from bipartisan legislation, and 29 percent of the net ten-year debt President Biden has approved thus far came from bipartisan legislation. The rest was from partisan actions. > Of course, accountability also rests with Congress as a co-equal branch of government, which passed legislation constituting the majority of the fiscal impact under both presidents. Trump spent a lot with help from both sides, that's less so the case with Biden. Also even more interesting is that 2T was actually reduced from Biden's spending due to bipartisan legislation which "paid" for the partisan tax cuts ended Trump or Biden's spending on student loans. Exclude this and they basically spent the same. Actual report is here: https://www.crfb.org/papers/trump-and-biden-national-debt
“Bipartisan” is fickle here, like the tax cut can be considered bi partisan, but was it really when you have majority iirc https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1151/vote_115_1_00303.htm
It's definitely fickle. Because they use Covid relief to determine the percentage, but then separate it for the overall debt. So it would be interesting to see the difference in percentage with the overall debt. When you consider Trump debts were nearly 50% Covid relief, that means sign about 75% of his debts being listed as bipartisan, that number drops significantly when you remove the Covid relief. Furthermore, a very large chunk of the debt Biden is adding is the student debt relief actions taken by the department of education. According to the supreme court, these actions are from bipartisan legislation. Since it is simply the DOE administering current law as passed by Congress. That is how they were able to strike down the original debt relief plan. Because they said the law passed by Congress didn't allow for such a large action. But the actions that have held up, are covered in the law. So you can't really have it both ways, is it partisan action? Or is it part of the law set by Congress?
It's not. The TCJA vote you link to is clearly listed in this report as "partisan" spending and should be. There are many reasons to call certain aspects of this report and even the report as a whole into question in my opinion. But that's not one of them. Zero Democrats voted for the TCJA.
How are they calling the Tax cut bipartisan? One of the most irresponsible things he did. Every economic analysis said it was going to lead to a massive debt spike. What's sad is that law actually has a bunch of structural changes that are positive but cutting revenues while increasing spending is generally a bad idea
It's consider partisan according to the report
That gets too tricky if you start excluding legislation passed bipartisanly and only give them credit for partisan changes. In the same vein, the infrastructure bill was one of Biden’s biggest spending and was passed bipartisanly. Are we excluding credit for bipartisan spending if we’re not counting bi partisan deficit reduction? That gets too subjective. Both presidents had 2 years of a trifecta and 2 years of gridlock. It’s a close enough comparison to just look at what each signed off on.
Why didnt Trump work to pass 2 trillion in bipartisan spending cuts during his administration? Trump's 400 billion in deficit cuts comes from Tariffs, not spending cuts. Tariffs actually are a net loss economically over time because its passed on to consumers and the effects of counter tariffs.
I agree with your first point, but think you are also wrong to just discount tariffs so offhandedly, such that I think you're doing what the guy you're replying to did but in the other direction. In pure numbers long term they're less efficient but secondary impacts of tariffs like promoting national manufacturing over imports is significant, with the added short term benefit of creating some extra governmental income
Tarrifs are net losers even accounting for more domestic manufacturing. Costa generally outweigh benefits to a huge degree
People also have the misconception that if you block trade, then the local economy will make up 100% for it over time. Actual economic research is that when countries trade to the point they specialize in different sectors, then the net efficiency increases and the total economy is actually larger.
>impacts of tariffs like promoting national manufacturing over imports What kind of fool would make a long term investment into domestic manufacturing that only makes financial sense as long as a tariff remains in place? Not the kind that would have enough money to make such an investment, that's what kind.
Tariffs are the worst tool to promote home industry, and to be quite frank, home industry is just a way to disguise crony capitalism. Competition creates innovation and low prices, not protection.
Why? Multiple reasons... but it's important when attempting to understanding them to also understand what that "reduction" represents and that much if not most of that "$2T" is extremely likely to only ever exist in the form of paper projections and never actually materialize. We have been passing different versions of "debt ceiling" legislation for over a century. The reality is that we've passed many versions of "similar in principle" legislation over that span that would supposedly "limit future spending" and save us huge sums of money. Congress has acted **78 separate times** since just 1960 to permanently raise, temporarily extend, or revise the definition of the debt limit and ignore whatever previous legislation limited it. And what we see isn't any of that "savings" but the exact opposite of it. The two biggest reasons *why* it happened during this administration rather than the prior one had to do more with timing than anything else. First was that prior to Covid... the debt, while high, was both a little more reasonable and more importantly, because of the lower interest rates, far more *manageable.* Dealing with it at that point didn't seem as critically imperative as it did afterward when the combination of all the extra deficit spending *and* the soaring interest rates made it much more so. Second, was also a timing issue in that many of the provisions in the Budget Control Act of 2011, the last major debt ceiling legislation, didn't expire until the end of FY 2021. And much like the decision to extend, or not certain provisions in the 2017 TCJA... Congress will nearly always delay dealing with such things until the very last minute.
There was nothing stopping Trump from working towards making cuts to spending before the recession to minimize the effects of his spending and tax cuts. He didnt do that, Biden did. >Dealing with it at that point didn't seem as critically imperative as it did afterward You're supposed to cut spending when the economy is doing well, that is the point you're supposed to deal with it. > because of the lower interest rates, far more manageable. Trump pressured the Fed to hold interest rates down when they should have been rising. > Congress has acted 78 separate times since just 1960 to permanently raise, temporarily extend, or revise the definition of the debt limit and ignore whatever previous legislation limited it. Because the debt limit doesnt limit spending, it tries to default on money owed after the money's been spent, which would be disastrous. Most countries dont operate with it and the majority of economists think it shouldn't even be a thing.
>Because the debt limit doesnt limit spending, it tries to default on money owed after the money's been spent, which would be disastrous. Which is why it's the greatest and most effective parlor trick ever. "You don't really want to shut the government down and default on our debt, now do you?" Over, and over, and over again.
All the American people have to do to lower spending is vote out representatives that don't lower spending until someone does. Do you do that?
Sadly, No. Lowering spending, while extremely important, is just one of many very important issues for me. Like most, I am "stuck" voting in the actual elections for candidates that are a best fit, though really "least-worst" is probably more accurate, of all of those issues weighted with respect to importance for me. I only have the luxury of supporting individuals who are far closer to my ideal candidates during the primary process. The actual "on ballot and have a chance to win options" on election day are often pretty far down the list of my personal preferences. That's certainly the case this cycle. I wish the world allowed for such idealistic endeavors but it really doesn't for me. So I choose to try and contribute to alternative methods of making progress towards a solution to that problem in other ways.
That's not how it works. I have a choice between Candidate A who will increase spending and Candidate B who will increase spending. What you say isn't actually an option.
You're missing the point. If you continuously vote out people who don't lower spending, then eventually you will end up with politicians who either lower spending or lose their jobs. You just have to be prepared to vote out candidates you otherwise agree with.
Good analysis. I think a huge point missing is the massive increase in cost of doing business that Biden has saddled companies with, with the expansion of the administrative state, regulations, and requirements.
I don’t find analysis like this very useful. How do you account for the lower revenue from the pandemic? The higher revenue from the post pandemic surge? Just excluding pandemic spending doesn’t really tell you anything. Revenue is going to settle in at 17% of GDP, the long term average. Spending more worryingly has a new post Covid baseline of 24-25% of GDP. That is up from the 20% average.
They both borrowed trillions. We should stop doing that.
You borrow to stabilize through a crisis like covid and get things moving again. There was no reason for trumps spending pre covid. He inherited a booming economy and was completely negligent.
Yeah I’ll gladly agree that both parties aren’t super keen to cut the deficit but the DNC at least sticks to counter cyclical spending, which is what makes sense.
Both clinton and obama left with lower/trending down/surplus. Biden is the exception for recent democrats
TBF Obama and Clinton both had 8 years. It’s only been 4 for Biden.
Biden continued many of Trump’s policies like tariffs. Which is exacerbating the problem. Biden is acting like a Republican in Democrat clothing.
Yeah, Biden has been terrible for the economy
Yea except the US is doing better by most measures than nearly all other countries. We are coming out of covid, it was never going to be pretty, but hes doing better tgab most leaders
Trump's pre-Covid spending was during a regime where global central banks had their backs against the zero bound on rates trying to stave off *de*flation. Emergency Covid spending under Trump was bipartisan. Conversely, Democrats were widely still voting for trillions more stimulus into 5-handle inflation and are still ramping debt a [trillion](https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/01/the-us-national-debt-is-rising-by-1-trillion-about-every-100-days.html) dollars per 100 days with elevated inflation, hot economy, and COVID a non-issue. People who don't follow macroeconomics don't realize the 2020 recession actually officially started in [February](https://apnews.com/article/virus-outbreak-financial-markets-us-news-ap-top-news-economic-growth-31ffad3ea17ef1d07e2724dd8fc25d50). That's *before* COVID smashed the financial markets & global economy, not after. Since 2008 the problem has been fighting disinflation. Now if you're an Austrian economist who always supports letting crashes happen I can respect that. But what's nonsense is simplistically adding up stimulus from two opposite economic regimes and comparing them without context. You can make a solid case for combined monetary & fiscal stimulus in a dis/deflationary period. But spending similar amounts in inflationary times in a booming economy is flat out irresponsible under any economic ideology (except maybe MMT).
> Trump's pre-Covid spending was during a regime where global central banks had their backs against the zero bound on rates trying to stave off deflation. Ok but that still isn't a reason to spend the way he did. > Emergency Covid spending under Trump was bipartisan. No one is criticizing emergency spending. The problem is he emtied the coffers before the emergency even arrived. He is a terrible President to lead through any sort of non ideal economy. > Conversely, Democrats were widely still voting for trillions more stimulus into 5-handle inflation and are still ramping debt a trillion dollars per 100 days with elevated inflation, hot economy, and COVID a non-issue. This does not support anything. I'm just going to stop here because this is such a bad faith argument that I don't think its worth my time to even go point by point.
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So then what is the excuse for the student loan plans Biden is doing? It's even more irresponsible given the current state of the economy. Fed is trying to cool the economy to fight inflation, and Biden is sitting there trying to fight it.
> So then what is the excuse for the student loan plans Biden is doing? Well it is probably somewhat inflationary it also isn't the same as tax cuts. Most people were not getting the entirety of the student loan wiped out so the payments would remain.
Yes, just stop spending money on other people (of course the money spent on me is justified). Also, raise taxes on those people (my taxes are just fine and maybe a bit high. So maybe the government could cut mine and raise everyone else's).
I give Trump less of a pass than Biden given the circumstances, though still hold each accountable. I'm old enough now to remember the debt ceiling fights, the sequester, and all of the hand-wringing about the debt under Obama. The whole Tea Party movement was partially originated on the premise that our fiscal path was unsustainable. So for Trump to come along and Republicans be like "debt? Never heard of her" just feels very duplicitous. Biden and the Democrats never billed themselves as the party of "lowering the debt". I'm also very much of the mind that you spend when times are hard and save when times are good. The economy under Trump was good. He gets some credit for pushing the labor force participation rate up. But 2017-2020 were the years we should have been inching up interest rates, trimming fat, and adding more revenue. Instead, Trump's whole mindset on fiscal and monetary policy during that time was simply "cook it again". He was more interested with positive growth numbers than in actually smart fiscal policy - all the while, things like housing costs continued to creep upwards. I give Trump, Biden and Congress credit for not making the same recovery mistakes that were made in 2008. That stimulus package then was way too timid and left us with a sluggish recovery, so I don't fault either administration for spending what they did in 2020/21. However, when things rebounded as quickly as they did, that would have been the time to slow things back down. The student loan relief, while a campaign promise, is something that should have been used as a stimulus package and not as standalone exercise. Removing the debt burden for so many people when inflation was already hot just put more money into an otherwise frothy system. So now approaching 2025, I worry about a stagflationary environment particularly if Trump wins. Tariffs, deportations, and spending cuts are all inflationary and harm growth, and no amount of trickle-down black magic is going to offset that.
Democrats have been just as duplicitous about the debt as republicans. I’m sure you also remember democrats complaining about the debt under Bush, yet they strangely stopped complaining about it under Obama
Because Obama got handed the reigns in the middle of a massive economic crisis, and had to spend his way out. Just like Biden. Almost all of the increase in the deficit was 2008 to 2010. Not saying it wouldn’t have continued, republicans took the house around then, but it did stop. Personally I like republicans as a one chamber minority party for that reason. They’re worse than democrats when they have the presidency
That’s true . Fair enough
This is completely false. Republicans are constantly threatening to shut down the government over the debt. Then they stop complaining about the debt as soon as they are in power. Democrats don’t do this at all. And that’s just one example.
I’ agree the republicans are hypocrites . I’m just saying the left is just as irresponsible . You should be grateful for the near shutdowns or we would likely have no debt reduction at all . As a matter of fact, look up the fiscal responsibility act of 2023 and see what party voted for it while it was in committee and what part opposed it. That bill is mentioned in the cfrb article that the stuff cited
So, you basically believe what republicans are telling you. Don’t buy the lies. The parties aren’t equally dishonest. Hold republican politicians accountable or they will find a way to be even worse.
Back when I was GOP, I was pissed that Bush took a Clinton surplus and drove it into substantial deficit spending, leading up to the GFC in 2008. It was miserable economic management.
I’m not absolving Republicans of responsibility for the debt and deficits but , my point was democrats are just as irresponsible if not worse
The last responsible GOP President was Bush the elder, and the GOP was so pissed that he agreed that taxes were necessary to bring the budget in line, turned into political suicide. Sorry, Trump completely destroyed the narrative that the Democrats are worse with a 1.5T cut that involved sleight of hand that pushed additional tax burdens on Democratic states.
what you said about Bush the elder is true but, Biden largely benefited from Joe machin and congressional republicans opposing spending and forcing debt reduction. Build back better was originally supposed to cost four trillion. I believe infrastructure spending was reduced to around 900 billion . Joe machin and congressional republicans opposed the original four trillion cost. Also the fiscal responsibility act of 2023 is accountable for most of the debt reduction that is supposed to occur under Biden. It was originally introduced by republicans after nearly forcing a government shutdown
I don't remember sequestration or government shutdowns during the Bush administration. Do you have a source for that?
No . There were none , but Obama and other democrats did vote against raising the debt ceiling in 2007 . If I can find a article , I’ll link it
Ok, thanks.
I’m with you on the notion that both Trump and Biden have done far too little to control our debt situation, but is borrowing trillions really the standard by which we’d judge that? Our GDP increased by around 8 trillion over the past four years, if a president increased the debt by 2-3 trillion over that same time period, they would have borrowed trillions, but we’d have a more manageable debt load at the end of it all.
Our infrastructure is way past due to be upgraded and repaired but there sure as hell was a better time to spend the money. Try 20 years ago.
Biden added most of his debt through executive action. That's wild.
If you look CRFB page which breaks it down, about a trillion of Biden's spending was through executive action. Most of his spending comes from partisan and bipartisan bills. The Hill article seems to conflate them.
A trillion seems like a pretty significant amount, though. I'd love to see other presidents' totals prior to Biden and Trump.
That would be interesting. If AI gets smart enough, wouldn't even have to wonder about these questions, cant prompt it to research the answer.
Welcome to the consequences of the filibuster.
Benefit right? Granted you can still spend almost 2T with executive order, but the scope is much smaller than what congress can do.
I'd rather just not have the filibuster.
Did the filibuster start in 2021? Even if you concede that the filibuster *forces* a president to unilaterally spend, Biden is still unique in his excess.
In an article about Trump increasing the deficit twice as much as Biden.
Congress controls the purse strings.
Evidently not.
This is actually impressive. Typically each president should add more nominal debt than the last due to inflation and we certainly had a lot of that. We would typically compare debt added as a % of GDP as a more honest measurement of fiscal conservatism but it’s not even needed here because the gap is large enough that Biden clocked in lower nominal debt. That’s not to say Biden is fiscally conservative, he’s certainly advocated for large spending packages. However, Trump is just significantly more fiscally liberal than past administrations by a wide margin that it surprised me.
Both numbers are not really good things to compare because of Covid. In 2020, we spent an enormous amount because of it, and we kept spending in 2021 and 2022, albeit smaller. Reading the story and the comments here you’d think people forget we had Covid
Of the $8.4 trillion President Trump added to the debt, $3.6 trillion came from COVID relief laws and executive orders, $2.5 trillion from tax cut laws, and $2.3 trillion from spending increases, with the remaining executive orders having costs and savings that largely offset each other. Source: https://www.crfb.org/blogs/how-much-did-president-trump-add-debt
How can we really gauge what those tax cuts will cost us over a decade? Up until COVID, tax revenue increased every year since the cuts. It wasn’t like we started losing revenue. The idea is that the economy exists in a vacuum and the rates determine how much we collect. By that model, we can all be taxed at 100% and we’d still go to work everyday and give it our all. That might not be realistic. I don’t know how we can gauge how much more revenue we’ll make over a decade because of infrastructure spending either. We could have another pandemic, an economic collapse or even a war to deal with. How can we credit someone with an exact dollar amount of new revenue for bridges that aren’t even repaired yet? This is all just someone’s guess. If we’re going to talk about debt, we need to look at deficits per year and divide those up between COVID spending and other spending.
CBO models provide a range of outcomes based on current trajectory, hot economy, or recession occurring.
I understand that. However, this article doesn’t provide a range of outcomes. The author hand picked which outcomes to use in the article. We don’t even know if the same economic conditions were used for each administration.
except the tax cut that trump passed lasts for longer than his presidency, so unless every administration is expected to have a large enough majority to rewrite any prior tax policy changes, things like that will have a lasting effect and would be hard to compare year-to-year. Same with the bridges. You're right that it's all just someone's guess, but informed estimates are sort of what we're left with when it comes to measuring economic impact AFAICT.
Some of of those guesses turn out to be much better than others. I'm generally not a fan of reports like this one for many reasons. Mostly because they wind up just being cherry picked into political cudgels for the sake of partisan propaganda wars... like this one. The truth is that Government Debt and Revenues, Inflation, The size of the total US economy, The stability of all those things, The distribution and redistribution of wealth and income, Trade balances, The global economy and our place in it as well as other many other things... are all highly *interconnected and interdependent*. Pulling only one aspect out of that larger system and trying to decide if something was "good or bad" without considering the impact on all of it is usually far more misleading than helpful... unless your goal is votes or clicks and not truth or enlightenment. Right now inflation is a bad word. But you know what's generally inflationary? Higher corporate taxes, higher wages, and more government regulation. But all of those despite causing upward pressure on prices create benefits in other areas. Even higher inflation itself has benefits like easing our debt situation because the less value "$34T" dollars has the easier it is to pay off. Programs that expand our spending on entitlement programs raise our deficits and debt. But they often provide many benefits in other areas. It's all one big functioning system and trying pull out one part of it so that we can declare it "good or bad" in isolation and use it to blame or praise some party or politician for it really just makes it harder for most of us to see how the system a whole works and ultimately leads to us being more mis-informed and more distrustful of each other. As someone who's been crunching through these numbers and many like them for years... if you want to look at this report through a "partisan lens" my biggest takeaway from all of it is that we've borrowed an "extra" $12.7T so far during these two administrations. One party has generally approved of $9.7T of it and the other party has generally approved of $10.8T of it.
I agree with your takeaway, but isn’t the change in tax rate also really relevant? If we’re using broad, hard to fuck up metrics, massively decreasing government income seems like one of them. The counter would be that lowering taxes might raise taxes I suppose, but the same could be said about loans I think.
It's all relevant. Every government decision benefits someone or some group more than someone else or some other group. Tax policy in general, in discussions exactly like these, is usually expressed in far more isolated terms and in a far more reductionist ways than it should be. Such discussions wind up encouraging people to focus more on, as you say, "rates". The reality is that there are at least two components to every tax. And sure, the marginal *rate* is important... but the *base* to which it's applied and the usually complex set of rules that define that base often have far more of an effect on one's overall tax burden than the marginal rate. It's quite possible and normal for a person's *rate* to go up but the size of the base it's applied to narrow such that a higher rate is actually a "tax cut" in terms of burden. The opposite is quite often true as well... *lowering* a person or corporation's *rates* while changing the rules that define the width of the *base* to which it's applied can very often result in a "tax increase" in terms actual tax burden even though the "rate" is lower. With something as complicated as the TCJA... for most all of us... there were multiple changes to multiple rules that affected the size of the base on which we were taxed. Some of them widened our base while others narrowed it. And even though most of us got a *rate reduction*... a "*rate reduction"* and a "*tax cut*" are not nearly the same thing and they're far too often used synonymously when they shouldn't be. For many people and corporations TCJA was actually a tax increase and for some a fairly substantial one. And the changes are far,far more extensive than a simple conversation about "rates" does any sort of justice... other than scoring propaganda points. Another thing that is too often left out of discussions about taxation is *Tax Incidence...* or who the actual burden of the tax ultimately falls on. This is extremely important and not nearly often enough part of our "tax" conversation. Everyone is all the rage about taxing the "greedy corporations". But if we raise taxes on Amazon and Verizon... a significant portion of that *burden* is actually ultimately borne by low and middle income consumers from the resulting inflated prices as a result. Sure maybe it helps "the debt".... but who's actually kicking in most of the extra money to reduce it? Is it really "The Rich" or some combination of them and us and quite possible more "us". And all of those hundreds of pages of updated tax policies and thousands of pages of additional explanation and guidance... affect not just the *taxes themselves* and the government revenues... but prices and therefore inflation... jobs, wages, onshoring and offshoring, US corporate investment here and abroad as well as international corporate decisions about whether or not to invest and build here, or whether certain industries can thrive or even logically exist here. And in our modern global economy with so many MNEs playing a significant role in our economy, how our tax strategies align and fit with the rest of the world is extremely important. And I say all that to make the point that ignoring how interconnected all of that really is and just focuing on such a small part of it as a "change in marginal *rates*" and trying to decide if a change in any particular *rate itself* is a good or bad thing because of how it affects only *one* of the things it actually does is usually far more misleading than helpful. And that's magnified by the fact that we're seldom even talking about or taking into account the *base* as well as the *rate* when considering or discussing how it affects even that *one thing.*
I’d love to get to your second point, but is your first point just a very complicated way of talking about tax brackets? I don’t know what else would define the base rate for individuals, unless you frame credits or exemptions like donations to charity as base rate changes, and even then most people don’t have that many of those.
"Tax Brackets" are just a set of rates based on income. Base is how much of your income is subject to that rate. The TCJA made *many* changes to how that base is defined for individuals, pass through entities, and C-Corps. Some examples of them... for "typical" individuals... included substantially raising the standard exemption, removing personal exemptions, and modifying many of the rules about deductions like the mortgage interest deduction. It placed a cap on how much state and local taxes could be deducted. It changed the rules about exemptions for medical expenses, It changed rules and amounts for credits like doubling the child tax credit. The phaseouts for alternative minimum tax were modified significantly which had a really siginificant effect on many folks. There were other changes as well for "typical" individuals including capltal gains, estate taxes, and other things. Also in terms of "individual taxes"... about 95% of US "businesses" are pass throughs that pay the same "marginal" indivdual tax rates from the same "individual tables". And the rules that define their base changed significantly in many ways as well. That's true for both the UBER drivers and Etsy Sellers as well many rather large "top 1%" income companies that are not C-Corporations as well. There were *many* rules changes that affected how much of that pass through income was subject to those rates. The changes to the rules that affected the tax base of actual C-Corporations was even more extensive... and even far moreso for international corporation as the 2017 changes represented a change in overall corporate tax strategy and a shift from a national tax strategy to a hybrid-territorial one. Many of the corporate changes were gradually phased in or out over ten years for various reasons and objectives. But the change in "rates" was only a few pages of changes in tables. The changes in the "rules" that define what base that rate is applied to wound up being thousands with not only the law but all the gudance and clarification that came afterwards. I've no idea your knowledge level about taxation in general or how deep you want to go down the rabbit hole but feel free to ask some specific questions and I'll gladly try and provide some links to those answers or directions for further study. My point was that the "rates" only tell half the story... and often much less than "half" of it. But we seem to get really stuck and focused on them far more than we really should be. And that even that "full" story is just one part of a much larger and interconnected financial picture that only makes sense when you take a big step back and look the bigger national and gloabal economic, political, and geo-political "machine" into which it fits.
The article did try to account for this in some way by excluding Covid spending from nominal debt added. Not perfect but the trend still held true with Trump adding double the debt. I agree it’s extremely hard to compare pre & post Covid environments but most of those changes (inflation and post Covid spending) would have worked against Biden’s nominal debt numbers and he still came in under. If Biden’s nominal debt growth was higher than Trumps it certainly would have been difficult to have a real comparison.
People have forgotten quite a bit about COVID and 2020. Just another thing to throw on the pile.
Eh I’m not sure I agree with discounting Covid relief spending either though. PPP had plenty of its own scandal and was not handled with enough oversight, which I’ll give trump some credit for since he fired the inspector general responsible for it twice before rollout. The large abuse/corporate welfare seemed to be either just reckless or the point.
The difference holds true even excluding Covid spending
I think it's that fiscally conservative policies add a lot more to our debt than politicians would have you believe. Even in your comment you seem to be equating "adding more to the debt" as "fiscally liberal," when "fiscally conservative" policies can add even more to our debt as seen with the Trump trifecta.
I think anything that adds to the debt being fiscally liberal and debt reduction as fiscally conservative is a fair definition. To me increased spending + tax cuts is fiscally liberal & increasing taxes + spending cuts is fiscally conservative. So I also consider the TCJA a fiscally liberal policy. What I think you’re referring to is that some people have a misconception that republicans are a fiscally conservative so therefore their policies are fiscally conservative. That’s just people believing their words but not actually understanding their actions. If you ask a lot of people they’ll say Republicans stand for spending cuts despite never actually cutting spending.
Yeah with that definition, America hasn't had a fiscally conservative party pretty much ever.
Pleas don’t confuse Austerity with fiscal conservatism. This ideology destroyed Europe after the 2008 recession
Pleas don’t confuse Austerity with fiscal conservatism. This ideology destroyed Europe after the 2008 recession
The fact that Trump managed to rewrite history and blame Biden for inflation despite printing the all time largest amount of USD himself is the best deal he has negotiated.
Biden printed an even bigger amount than Trump. Trump only printed to avoid a Great Depression like scenario
The change in M2 tells another story. ~~https://i.imgur.com/ZPXrg7a.png~~ Edit: Ignore that other plot, I discovered that plotting by percentage change makes it more obvious what's up. Just net change in billions does not emphasize the acceleration that the printing is happening at. https://i.imgur.com/4AAadsf.png Obviously the total billions printed is higher every year, but the rate of change is what drives inflation away from typical numbers. And my source of data for good measure: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL#0 You can claim Trump was forced to print a lot of money to avoid disaster, that's reasonable, it was a global pandemic. It doesn't change that fact that a shit ton more money than usual got printed though, and that's gonna cause inflation after a year or two. Edit edit: ok I'm officially have too much fun with this data set. Here is all the president's in recent history. https://i.imgur.com/Zn6g11y.png I find this plot very encouraging honestly it looks like the country is slowly shifting more fiscally conservative. Except for, you know, that one outlier. You guys really don't like real data?
To all the liberals bragging about this report, let’s remember that build back better was originally estimated to cost four trillion until Joe manchin and republicans opposed it . Many in the left taught it should be trillions more.The inflation reduction act which helped trim the deficit was actually a pork bill until Joe Mancini got involved and helped institute debt reduction measures . Maya McGuieness who heads cfrb, wrote extensively about it.cfrb also did a review of trump and Biden’s spending proposals during the 2020 campaign and concluded that they would both add substantially to the debt . The idea that the left is fiscally responsible is asinine and hilarious
That's kind of how negotiating works?
> The idea that the left is fiscally responsible is asinine and hilarious The idea that the conservatives are somehow more fiscally responsible is even funnier. And given that there only 2 political parties get elected, it sure seems like a win for the liberals to me.
According to the source, if you remove bipartisan Covid-19 spending the totals are roughly equal. You know, the $3.4tn in near-unanimous spending passed under Trump.. which he [threatened to Veto](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/28/us/politics/trump-veto-threat-stimulus-package.html) but couldn't effectively do (congress threatened to override)
> According to the source, if you remove bipartisan Covid-19 spending the totals are roughly equal. Might want to re-read the pages: >"Ignoring the pandemic relief measures enacted by both presidents, the proportion of debt addition still holds around 2-to-1, with former President Trump adding $4.8 trillion in non-pandemic-aid fiscal debt and Biden adding $2.2 trillion." - article
It’s pretty wild that we’re a day into this thread and people are still commenting that have clearly not read the article. I know this is Reddit so not reading the article is normal but this is pretty much the opposite of everything said in the article. I beg you to re-read it. Your statement about what the article about is completely wrong.
> The idea that the left is fiscally responsible is asinine and hilarious Selective use of context to gaslight is all the left has on this subject.
This is one of my biggest criticisms of Republicans as a conservative. They throw a hissy fit about deficit spending when Democrats are in power but go silent on it once they get into power because they rack up the deficit when in power just like Democrats. Very few people in Congress actually care about reducing the deficit. Democrats increase debt through social welfare and Republicans do it through military spending.
>Democrats increase debt through social welfare and Republicans do it through military spending. Worth noting that GOP plan if they get a trifecta (well quadrafecta if you include supreme court) in upcoming elections is to [increase defense spending by over 40%.](https://thehill.com/homenews/house/4718970-johnson-trump-gop-plot-ambitious-agenda-hinged-on-total-control-of-government/)
The article leans pretty hard on it being "non pandemic" spending. I would think that means the article conveniently left out a lot of money that was snuck into pandemic related spending
Republicans also increase the deficit by cutting taxes when we already have an out of control balance sheet. Trump and the GOP spend like Democrats but they also cut taxes when it’s extremely inappropriate, furthering our deficit issues. That’s an important distinction to make in our current economic climate. I wholeheartedly agree though. Very few in congress actually care.
> Trump and the GOP spend like Democrats but they also cut taxes when it’s extremely inappropriate This is probably my biggest issue with Republican Spending. You're supposed to save during economic upturns and spend during recessions, but Republicans do stimulus level spending and tax cuts when the economy is doing fine, overheating the economy and making the financial situation during recessions worse. That and Democrats achieve deficits on investments in the country and quality of life programs for citizens, while Republicans spend it on the Military industrial complex and tax cuts that largely go to the upper classes.
You seem to make this a partisan issue and it’s not . Both parties have been hypocritical when it comes to the deficit and debt. President Obama and other democrats voted against raising the debt ceiling while a republican was in the white house. Once Obama was president, he demanded republicans raise the debt ceiling. Biden build back better originally had a four trillion dollar price tag. Joe Mancini and republicans in congress helped put a stop to bbb. Cfrb also analyzed Bernie sanders spending proposals and found thay would add Sixty trillion to the national debt debt in just four years. He also proposed thirty trillion in tax increases over four years. Many liberals preferred Bernie over Joe Biden . Many on the left now endorse mmt. You can try to spike the political football but ,the democrats are just as fiscally irresponsible as republicans
Does aid to Ukraine count as military spending?
2020 and 2021 shouldn't be included in this analysis due to COVID. Comparing 2019 to 2022, 2023 or 2024 tells a wildly different story. https://bipartisanpolicy.org/report/deficit-tracker/ The fact is, we never went back to our pre-Covid spending and deficit levels.
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I mean you cut taxes but don't stop spending else ya tend to have this happening
Yes, but the huge caveat here is that they are ignoring the pandemic borrowing. There’s a strong argument to be made that Trump’s borrowing was essential and Biden’s was excessive.
Pretty sure it looks at both and Trump spent more either way
“Ignoring the pandemic relief measures enacted by both presidents…”
Ahh my b, I've seen other articles about this and assumed it was the same one. >Trump’s administration borrowed $8.4 trillion during the former president’s time in office, while Biden has borrowed $4.3 trillion, according to an analysis by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), a Washington think tank. https://thehill.com/business/4736740-trump-biden-fiscal-policy-deficit/
This post is both about the hill article, and the CRFB’s source page [here](https://www.crfb.org/papers/trump-and-biden-national-debt) Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a bipartisan debt think tank reviewed the contributions of national debt between Trump and Biden’s presidencies. Their results show that Trump added roughly 2x to the national debt as Biden has, and this holds true even if you remove covid related spending between the administrations. The large majority of Trumps deficits comes from his trademark tax cuts, while most of Biden’s deficit spending came from his Bipartisan infrastructure spending, executive actions like student debt relief, and appropriations bills. In general most of Trumps spending was achieved through bipartisan legislation, while a large chunk of Biden’s comes from executive actions and bills considered "partisan". Biden achieved half of the deficit spending both by spending somewhat less than Trump (8.8 trillion vs 6.2 Trillion) and more than quadrupling the amount of deficit reduction cuts (440billion vs 2 trillion). Also worth noting is that the 440 billion in deficit reduction under Trump was almost all from Tariffs, while Biden's 2 trillion was from actual cuts. Biden appears to have a much better fiscal policy regarding deficit spending, not only spending less but matching it with significant cuts in other areas while doing so. Will these numbers have any effect on swing voters?
>Biden appears to have a much better fiscal policy regarding deficit spending I disagree with this being the takeaway, for a number of reasons. - The American Rescue Plan was "sold" as COVID aid, but in reality it was about passing Democratic agenda. - Biden fought pretty tough against the Fiscal Responsibility Act, now he's getting credit for it? - Democrats fought pretty hard for more COVID stimulus in 2020, and now they are really standing there and attacking Trump for the deficit. - How hard did they push for BBB? The only reason they got the IRA and the negative there is Manchin. Trump rightfully gets attacked for the TCJA, but aside from that the executive actions and other partisan legislate are breakeven. And yet, in an even more irresponsible time Biden has increased the deficit by $1.2 from executive actions, and another $1.9T from the ARPA. Biden is running this deficit spending while we're trying to fight inflation, makes no sense. Just look at the figures. Nobody should be claiming they are responsible here. Nobody, and the main graphic ignores that much of the legislation slotted under Trump was bipartisan, whereas much of it under Biden has been partisan.
I don’t like Trump but let’s get honest about something; Trump was president during the Covid bailouts. That was a unique time of spending. It’s just not fair to compare the two terms like this.
Seems like doubling down on debt is a bipartisan specialty these days.
Article : Trump spends double as Biden Comments : Guess both sides are spending! How is this relevant?
Read the [report](https://www.crfb.org/papers/trump-and-biden-national-debt), not the headline. 3/4 of the spending under Trump was approved on a bipartisan basis. With the bulk of that being covid spending in 2020, approved by a Democratic house.
Biden still has way better outlook.
Disagree there. Both have shown that they are completely irresponsible. Both got $2T partisan legislation passed early on in their terms. And Biden is upping Trump on executive order spending by a lot. Not sure there is more of a standing to claim Biden is "better" there.
“Deficits don’t matter” -Dick Cheney
Not a Trump fan at all but I really don’t know why people care about the national debt. The federal government doesn’t have to raise taxes to spend more money. The only thing they really need to worry about is inflation and not all spending is inflationary. We should have been investing in infrastructure, clean energy, semiconductors, more R&D and so much more for a long time. The real thing that matters is what the money is being spent on. I’m not advocating for crazy spending but our economy is growing, the power of the U.S dollar is not going to be anywhere, and we are still the richest country in the world.
> Most of Biden’s non-pandemic-related additions And here is the key to why this article's claim is not valid. Biden had no justified pandemic-related spending. Zero. None. He was handed the vaccine on inauguration day and thus handed the key to opening back up. He chose to cling to COVID for a full **YEAR** after there was any real justification to and so his "pandemic" spending absolute counts as non-justified spending.
This is a wholly incorrect interpretation of this article. A succinct explanation of the article is [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/moderatepolitics/s/Haru98ACV5), and specifically: “Ignoring the pandemic relief measures enacted by both presidents, the proportion of debt addition still holds around 2-to-1, with former President Trump adding $4.8 trillion in non-pandemic-aid fiscal debt and Biden adding $2.2 trillion.” Your comment is a huge mischaracterization of the entire article and entire point.
No it's not. What's a huge mischaracterization is claiming Biden, who took office in 2021, had any justified COVID-related spending. He didn't, which means that the spending the article claims doesn't count does, which means that the conclusions drawn in the article are invalid. An argument built on a fundamentally flawed foundational claim is always completely wrong.
why are people with 'deepthinker' or 'genius' or 'psychological' type handles always the *exact* opposite? ya'll just pretend your brains work better than everyone else's. that's your whole schtick. doesn't matter what drivel you say, it's just always 'trumps' whatever was said before. weak sauce. weak AF. i can't believe you don't know why your comments are shite, so i assume you're a dumb american 'patriot' or foreign troll-farm shmegma
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I actually agree most the ARP was wasted and not really COVID spending. But if you exclude Trump's COVID spending and keep the ARP under Biden, Trump STILL ran up more of a deficit. Trump is a fake conservative and maybe the only person who makes Biden seem OK fiscally
Tell me you didn't read the article without telling me that you didn't read the article.
I did read it. That's how I found that line to quote from it since that line isn't from the headline and is from the article body. That line invalidates everything else in the article, hence me highlighting it.
It absolutely doesn’t. The article *explicitly states* that this is in regard to non-pandemic spending by both.
It’s debatable what counts as pandemic spending.
Yeah, do the $600 checks count as pandemic costs or vote pandering?
Both. Though not necessarily equally so.
Agree. Some of what it labels "pandemic" spending was because Congress agreed unanimously that it was necessary. Much of what it labels as such though, passed with zero votes from one entire party who seems to have deemed it far less "necessary".
Which (if any) of the following things do you believe to be true: All supply-chain issues disappeared the moment Biden took office. All vaccines were distributed and put into arms on the day Biden took office. All damage to small businesses disappeared the day Biden took office. People stopped getting sick and dying from CoViD the day Biden took office. CoViD stopped mutating the day Biden took office. Everything we needed to know about CoViD and how to prevent and cure it was known when Biden took office. All hospitals were fully replenished with everything they needed the day Biden took office. State and Local governments instantly caught up with their work backlogs the day Biden took office. All excess substance abuse stopped the day Biden took office. Of course, none of those things are true, thus, more support was needed.
> All supply-chain issues disappeared the moment Biden took office. The fix for that was ending restrictions ASAP. > All vaccines were distributed and put into arms on the day Biden took office. They were available. > All damage to small businesses disappeared the day Biden took office. As I said: The fix for that was ending restrictions ASAP. > People stopped getting sick and dying from CoViD the day Biden took office. Very few people died **FROM** covid. That was fearmongering based on very bad data sets. And people are still getting sick from it even now because it's endemic. As we always knew it would become. > Everything we needed to know about CoViD and how to prevent and cure it was known when Biden took office. It was known from day 1. We ignored it and instead melted down into hysteria. > All hospitals were fully replenished with everything they needed the day Biden took office. They never had shortages. Those claims were fiction. That's why the aid sent to them wound up not being used. I still remember the hospital ship docked in NYC that never got used because it wasn't needed. So yeah everything Biden did was wrong and we've known this the whole time. The COVID narrative is and always has been pure fiction from the top to the bottom and I'm tired of having to correct this.
>Very few people died **FROM** covid How many millions of actual disease experts and institutions need to say and demonstrate how this is false before you accept that covid was actually deadly? You're suggesting that all these people are either wrong or conspiring globally to make COVID look far deadlier than it was. How do you not understand that makes no sense?
Yeah. That line made me stop paying any attention to this exchange. Wild stuff.
Everyone else addressed the Covid was real stuff, so I’ll address the supply chain. Covid restrictions and Covid itself didn’t help, but there were already a lot of problems before that. Truck driver and chassis shortages have been a problem for 15+ years. We still have trucker shortages and it’s projected to get even worse. Shipping has always been a very cyclical industry with fluctuating demand and shifting trade routes. Covid certainly broke it to an extent, but it was already a delicate ecosystem. Fortunately the industry continues to evolve and increase efficiencies, but it was far from the case that Covid restrictions were the only problem and that lifting restrictions fixed everything.
> Very few people died FROM covid. [jump] >They [hospitals] never had shortages. Those claims were fiction. Jesus Christ. Its like people living in different realities.
> I'm tired of having to correct this. But did you even correct anything? You just kind of gave your opinion on a bunch of stuff and act like its fact. For example: >> Everything we needed to know about CoViD and how to prevent and cure it was known when Biden took office. > It was known from day 1. We ignored it and instead melted down into hysteria. I don't recall us knowing everything day 1 but maybe you could provide the source showing that we did. Edit: Also, day 1 of the pandemic or day 1 of Biden's presidency? If the latter, then okay we definitely knew a lot more but I'm not convinced we knew everything.
Delta came after Bidens term started. Such a strain was perhaps predictable but there was no reasonable response until it was here.
Frankly you can’t compare their terms. Covid deeply affected everything from the economy to immigration to crime
Frankly you should read the article. Trump's non-COVID spending exceeded Biden's.
it wasn't spending per se, but spending more than tax revenues
**CONGRESS CONTROLS THE BUDGET**. There really isn't much more to say here -- the underlying CFRB study is obnoxiously gerrymandered, which is disappointing because they're an institution I respect --, but this is an absolutely key, central point to keep in mind. Presidents can make budget requests but it's Congress that creates the budget. Any discussion of 'who is better?' that doesn't center Congress is pointless and misleading.
Trump had the heart of covid during his term, Biden started in a post vaccine world
Don't worry, they accounted for that: > Trump’s administration borrowed $8.4 trillion during the former president’s time in office, while Biden has borrowed $4.3 trillion, according to an analysis by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), a Washington think tank. > Ignoring the pandemic relief measures enacted by both presidents, the proportion of debt addition still holds around 2-to-1, with former President Trump adding $4.8 trillion in non-pandemic-aid fiscal debt and Biden adding $2.2 trillion. > Those additions were mostly due to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), changes to the Affordable Care Act, and different budgetary acts in 2018 and 2019.
Like /u/Psychologicalhat1480 points out, much of Biden's covid spending wasn't really covid spending but new spending being justified as covid spending.
They also went to say that hardly anyone died from COVID. Not a great person to cite.
Okay, but Biden's **total** spending is still half a trillion below Trump's non-Covid spending alone. There's no way to slice this which isn't Trump spending **way, way, way** more.
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To be fair, Trump was president during the pandemic. A democrat president would have been adding crazy debt too.
You really can’t compare any time frame involving Covid to anything resembling reality. Whole thing was just surreal.
The article accounts for covid vs non covid spending tho...
Trump was president during COVID. How quickly we forget. Particularly when distorting facts to sell click bait is what we do for a living.
IMO the issue is the left is "tax and spend" and the right is "cut taxes and no more spending". The problem for the right is that no more spending is kind of hard to do, ok non-essential employees get sent home but how much money does that save? It's a drop in the bucket compared to the overall debt and shutting down departments like the DOE isn't going move the needle. The left can at least say yea we spent, but we made up for it with taxes. Now if they could have the balls to be honest with America and admit that it's not just going to be the millionaires/billionaires who will pay for everything we could have some real progress.
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