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How much of it is "the current administration" and how much is simply the continuation of a much longer trend? The US has been at war with this or that country
by usrnm 1mo ago
How much of it is "the current administration" and how much is simply the continuation of a much longer trend? The US has been at war with this or that country in the Middle East for as long as I'm alive and I'm almost 40. Same with tax cuts, high spending and so on. It's easy to blame everything on Trump (or Reagan), but it seems to be a much broader issue with the whole system
- snarf21 1mo agoYes, this has been going on a long time. However, I think there is quite a bit of data about who is in charge or the White House and Congress when taxes go down/up or the deficit goes down/up, etc. It doesn't take more than one online search to see a very distinct pattern.
- thenatureboy 1mo ago[flagged]
- cowboylowrez 1mo agoHehe its not that complicated, if it were, Trump wouldn't have bothered taking on the job haha according to the school of thought I've gathered from conservatives, its "loot or be looted". Not much cognitive effort needed here, "extremely complicated" lol u can miss me with that dodge
- smallmancontrov 1mo agoIf the simple facts don't tell the story you want to hear, you'll just pile on complexity until you can't hear it. But the facts remain.
- smallmancontrov 1mo agoDemocrats Change in Deficit --------- ----------------- Joe Biden -6.1% GDP Barack Obama -6.4% GDP Bill Clinton -5.0% GDP Jimmy Carter -0.2% GDP Republicans Change in Deficit ----------- ----------------- Donald Trump +8.6% GDP George W. Bush +11.0% GDP George H. W. Bush +1.1% GDP Ronald Reagan +0.2% GDP Gerald Ford +2.3% GDP Richard Nixon +0.7% GDP Dwight Eisenhower -1.1% GDP
- yangikan 1mo agoThank you. Could you please point me to the source?
- smallmancontrov 1mo agoSource: https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/information-resources/budget/historical-tables/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/information-resources/budget/...
- bamboozled 1mo agoI found this under the same domain: https://www.whitehouse.gov/lab-leak-true-origins-of-covid-19/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/lab-leak-true-origins-of-covid-19..., weird.
- smallmancontrov 1mo agoLet's count our blessings that the ongoing campaign to fill whitehouse.gov with Republican partisan hackery doesn't extend to the boring accounting parts. Yet.
- pjc50 1mo agoAnd yet every single Fox talking head says the opposite, resulting in half the country thinking it's Democrats responsible for the deficit. Propaganda is magic.
- digitaltrees 1mo agoThank you for this. I am so tired of false equivalence. Democrats passed Obamacare, the chips act, the infrastructure bill and countless other large impactful pieces of legislation that people take for granted. And did that while reducing the deficits. Republicans killed investment in solar energy ceding the industry to China, same with EVs. We would be better positioned with abundant electricity with AI needing vast amounts, but we’ve put them in charge yet again at a critical moment. Biden had a coherent policy that would have been predictable. Trump randomly banned fable but not gpt5.6 which caused most the world to decide that reliance on American AI is extremely risky…good job.
- digitaltrees 1mo agoClinton balanced the budget. There was a surplus. Go read Articles from the 90s there was fear that we would pay down the debt too fast and it would harm the economy. Obama was on tracy to reduce the deficit and likely would have had the financial crisis not required stimulus. Biden was using debt to invest in infrastructure and things like power generation that would yield returns unlike tax cuts that just exacerbate wealth concentration and inflation by asset appreciation due to capital chasing the same assets. It’s not symmetrical one party is driving this and the irony is that they are the “fiscally responsible” party. No amount of discipline is possible for democrats if every time they balance the budget republicans use the savings to cut taxes further.
- mmooss 1mo agoBiden also had to respond to the deflationary risk of the Covid pandemic.
- forestry 1mo agoPrinting hundreds of billions of dollars is also inflationary. Governments change but the impact of all this takes a very long time to flow through the economy.
- mmooss 1mo ago> Printing hundreds of billions of dollars is also inflationary. They borrow the money, but yes, inflationary is the point of doing it.
- digitaltrees 1mo agoExcept American was in a structural slump similar to but not quite as bad as japans lost decade which meant that interest rates were stuck as near 0% percent. The inflation caused by Covid actually broke that cycle and American was on a much better path. Go look at articles from the last year of bidens term in the economist and financial times. The US had achieved a soft landing by bringing inflation down to within fed targets while avoiding a recession. We were the envy of the world. Income inequality was reducing, real wages were increasing for the first time in generations and productivity vs wages were converging. Now we’re back to chaos and inflation and wage stagnation.
- BLKNSLVR 1mo agoMost definitely. Trump just added a little bit of gunpowder to a fire that was already burning pretty self sustainably. Just a little turbo boost to get to the dark future a bit quicker. If the fire wasn't already burning, Trump wouldn't have been able to bring such a number of cronies together - just look at the tech bros, they already had everything, but they still chose to lick the boot because they want moar!
- insane_dreamer 1mo agoforeign policy has always been a mess, and the US has always been a bully but in terms of the deficit, the difference between Trump and other admins (Bush aside) is stark: just take a look at the table in one of the other comments (which I won't repeat here)