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The last time an administration engineered a budget surplus, voters soundly rejected a continuation of that regime in favor of an 8-year spending binge. A subst

• ericmcer 2y ago
  I legitimately cant tell who you are referring too, politics is so muddled now that both sides believe wholeheartedly that their side is the one with the correct plan to fix the economy.
  • runako 2y ago
    I wrote it that way intentionally. The data are available, so it's easy enough to find out "who was president during the last budget surplus" and "who presided over the largest increase in the federal debt." Some people will be surprised by the answers and will see the data as partisan. I'm not linking to sources because people feel the need to find the sources or they don't believe them. But there are a number of graphs of the numbers available on the Internet. Suffice it to say that any adviser advising a presidential candidate to pay any attention to the deficit beyond lip service is doing that candidate a disservice, as voters have shown time and again that they simply do not care.
    • silverquiet 2y ago
      I think I first heard Biden say, "don't tell me what you believe, show me your budget and I'll tell you what you believe". He perhaps got it from Ted Kennedy who I doubt was the first person to say it, but I've just found it to be one of the simplest ways to cut through BS. Talk is cheap; doing the work is not. And as you say, when you look at the US budget deficit through the last half century, it's quite clear that the party that claims the mantle of fiscal responsibility it not on the level.
    • WalterBright 2y ago
      Congress does the budget. The President just signs it (or not).
      • runako 2y ago
        Congress does all legislation. Saying the President "just" signs legislation handily relieves the President of responsibility for any laws they sign during their tenure. But Presidents typically take credit for their legislative wins, so we also give them credit for budgets they sign. (It is also the case that one measure of the efficacy of an administration is the quality of the budgets they are able to coax out of Congress.)
      • brookst 2y ago
        Eh, the majority party in controls the budget negotiations, and the president is either the leader of that party or of the minority party. Either way there is considerably more involvement than just signing the result of other people’s work.
        • deleted 2y ago
          [deleted]
        • smileysteve 2y ago
          And contextually, the change in the deficit still aligns with the Party of the President (and party of the senate majority)
        • WalterBright 2y ago
          Reagan had to make a lot of concessions to the Democrat majority in Congress to get the budget passed. It wasn't much of the budget he wanted.
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      • adastra22 2y ago
        That's like crediting a football team's chapionship win 100% to the players and 0% to the coach. It's true in the most literal sense, yet widely missing the mark.
    • nine_k 2y ago
      According to Investopedia [1], US debt rose most under administrations of FDR, Woodrow Wilson, and Ronald Reagan. This is pretty easy to explain by their terms coinciding with winning in WWII, WWI, and the Cold War respectively. The last president to attain a budget surplus was indeed a surprise for me. [1]: https://www.investopedia.com/us-debt-by-president-dollar-and-percentage-7371225 https://www.investopedia.com/us-debt-by-president-dollar-and...
  • adastra22 2y ago
    There was a surplus in the last year of the Clinton presidency, so I presume he's referring to George W Bush. There was also the whole 9/11 and War on Terror thing in the first year of his presidency though, so it's hardly a fair comparison. Gore would have blown his budget if he'd won too. Largely speaking democrat administrations reduce the deficit while republican administrations increase the deficit, despite this being the polar opposite of political talking points.
    • gpm 2y ago
      Data for anyone looking: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFSD https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFSD
    • runako 2y ago
      > the whole 9/11 and War on Terror I remember the budget hawks in the aughts saying that if the administration wanted to spend a ton of money on wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (this: unrelated to 9/11), that it would be fiscally prudent to raise tax revenue to cover the costs. Bush instead cut tax revenue substantially. I'm not making a judgement either way, just saying that there was a choice here and Bush made the choice to increase the deficit. (Dick Cheney was correct when he advised Bush that deficits don't matter. The increase in the deficit indeed didn't matter to the electorate, and the deficit spending, in part via tax cuts, did win him a second term.)
    • trueismywork 2y ago
      Gore might have blown his budget by investing in Solar instead..
      • adastra22 2y ago
        Both Gore and Clinton were actual budget hawks. A big part of his campaign was highlighting the fact that the last few years had been budget surpluses, and talking about paying off the debt entirely.
      • antifa 2y ago
        We all know he would have been better than Bush, the bar is low, but you don't have to make it look like we missed out on the least shitty president in all of US history.
  • throw0101d 2y ago
    > I legitimately cant tell who you are referring too How old are you? If you're a Gen-Xer you should remember Clinton's surpluses if you followed the news: * https://www.brookings.edu/articles/a-surplus-if-we-can-keep-it-how-the-federal-budget-surplus-happened/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/a-surplus-if-we-can-keep-... Then Bush got in (beating Gore by ~600 votes in Florida to take the Electoral College), and then did tax cuts and later war spending: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_tax_cuts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_tax_cuts * https://www.cbpp.org/research/the-legacy-of-the-2001-and-2003-bush-tax-cuts https://www.cbpp.org/research/the-legacy-of-the-2001-and-200... More recently, when the GOP controlled Congress and White House (Trump), they did a bunch of tax cuts: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_Cuts_and_Jobs_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_Cuts_and_Jobs_Act
• jandrewrogers 2y ago
  The US Congress, and the House specifically, are responsible for spending. Looking at who was President at any point in time is misdirection.
  • MathMonkeyMan 2y ago
    I think that the executive proposes the budget, though. Maybe where you end up has a lot to do with where you start.
    • pdonis 2y ago
      > I think that the executive proposes the budget The budgeting process is a huge hairball of political Rube Goldberg contraptions, and who "proposes" the budget on paper has very little to do with the actual political maneuvering involved. As far as the point of this discussion is concerned, both Congress and the President are responsible, since both branches are deeply involved in the political maneuvering.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  • runako 2y ago
    To the best of my recollection, all of the budgets in the timeframe I mention were signed by the sitting president. (I realize this is not necessary for laws to take effect, but in the years I cited I believe the presidents all signed the budgets into law.) If you want to argue that presidents are not responsible for laws bearing their signatures, I stridently disagree.
    • jandrewrogers 2y ago
      Presidents can only sign what is put in front of them. They have the option to veto, and sometimes do, but in many cases they may view that as the worst of two bad choices.
      • runako 2y ago
• jjk166 2y ago
  > voters soundly rejected a continuation of that regime In that election the democrats had net gains in both houses of congress, the democratic presidential candidate won the popular vote, and the presidential election was won by 537 votes. I don't know how this could be called "soundly rejected."
  • runako 2y ago
    Fair! To the point of this discussion, after they saw the Bush deficits, they reelected him.
• mlh496 2y ago
  Congress writes the budget, not the President's administration. What was notable about the late 90s was for the first time in 40 years the Democrats did not control the House of Representatives. One could argue that divided government forces compromise which is a good thing. Personally, I think the financial problems in the United States transcend political party.
  • runako 2y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41269867 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41269867 > financial problems in the United States transcend political party Correct, in part because voters do not care.
• alaxhn 2y ago
  I am going to argue slightly on your wording although I fully acknowledge the numbers do line up with your timeline. RE the budget surplus, the dotcom boom led to a large increase in taxes collected which collapsed from 2000 to 2003. Similarly countries naturally spend more when their population is either skewing old or skewing young. The US hit peak working-age demographics during the period you are describing. The outcome doesn't seem to be "engineered" so much as accidental. In fact taxes on balance were cut during this timeframe while significant contributors to the long term debt / future crisis were unleashed (glass steagall repeal which arguably led to the great financial crisis & federal loans for eduction were dramatically expanded without oversight to ensure the money was being well spent). Similarly, the covid response caused an explosion in the budget deficit which I wouldn't blame squarely on "a candidate's economic policy". The 2023 deficit in real dollars and as a % of GDP the largest (by a fair amount!) outside of a war, economic crisis, or the covid response. This doesn't even count the ~400? billion in student loan forgiveness that was attempted and failed. "Generally, looking at the last 30 years or so, it is evident that voters do not care about this issue very much" <- 100% agree.
  • runako 2y ago
    My bias is that I don't give mulligans or asterisks to presidents[1]. Every administration faces a unique set of challenges, and some of those will be financial. Most of the others will involve large-scale finances. So I don't grant escapes to administrations that are hit by recession, war, or plague. That's literally part of the job. How that relates to the (relevant!) factors you raise is that firstly, most of them were knowable at the time. Bush knew that tax revenue was falling when he proposed his tax cuts. He also planned two foreign wars without planning to pay for them. These were choices that were quite obviously, without the benefit of hindsight, going to lead to increased deficits. Covid was unpredictable, but the administration had choices on how to handle the deficit spending. Notably, they did not choose to increase revenue in any meaningful way. And the administration was not blocked by Congress in this, raising revenue was simply not a concern mooted by the Executive. (They did not even add spring-loaded revenue increase that would trigger when the economy recovered.) These choices to increase the deficit were made will roughly all the information we have now. Both choices were contemporaneously derided by deficit hawks; it is not a surprise that they raised the deficit. But again, Dick Cheney was correct that deficits do not matter (to voters). 1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20300697 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20300697
• maga27383 2y ago
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