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It's not really any mystery. We had a surplus in the Late 90's. Taxes were cut by George W Bush and again by Trump. There is no such thing as a self-funding

• NewJazz 2y ago
  Didn't we also have a financial crisis in the late 90s? Asian financial crisis, Dotcom bubble? Was the surplus during those years?
  • oblio 2y ago
    Fairly sure Clinton left with a surplus. The Asian financial crisis primarily affected... Asia, and the dotcom bubble wasn't a humongous issue outside of IT, which was a much smaller sector back then.
    • Jtsummers 2y ago
      https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/national-deficit/ https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/natio... Yes, he did. Deficit spending returned with George W Bush, reaching a high with the Global Financial Crisis, was getting back under control until Trump, and then peaked with COVID.
      • ceejayoz 2y ago
        edit: Whoops.
        • deleted 2y ago
          [deleted]
        • Jtsummers 2y ago
          > getting back under control until Trump You seem to have misread my comment, I wrote "until", not "under". Also, it actually increased twice under Obama. The peak before COVID was in FY 2008 (fully under Bush), then it was slightly better in FY 2009 (Bush and Obama), then rose again in FY 2010 (fully Obama), then declined until FY 2016 when it rose again (fully Obama) and continued rising under Trump.
          • ceejayoz 2y ago
            Argh, my bad. Definitely a misread on my part.
            • Jtsummers 2y ago
              No worries, you actually had me questioning what I wrote and I had to make sure I didn't mistype "under" for "until". macOS is aggressively wrong with autocorrect and I hadn't turned it off on this computer.
    • dragonwriter 2y ago
      > Fairly sure Clinton left with a surplus. 1998-2001 had budget surpluses [0], but despite some quarterly drops, the national debt was generally climbing all through that period. [1] [0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFSD https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFSD [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEBTN https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEBTN
  • Jtsummers 2y ago
    All these numbers are public. I linked this in another response: https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/national-deficit/ https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/natio... But you can get a lot of data from this site: https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/datasets/ https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/datasets/
• alabastervlog 2y ago
  The wholly unnecessary war in Iraq (I’ll allow Afghanistan though I think that was also a very, very stupid move) didn’t help. Trillions of dollars. But yes it’s largely tax cuts. Including cutting taxes while starting that war.
• stouset 2y ago
  Ah yes, I “fondly” remember constantly being told that tax cuts would stimulate the economy so much they’d be revenue-positive. This, it turned out, was a lie. And not a very convincing one to anyone with even half a functioning brain cell.
  • water9 2y ago
    [flagged]