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We watched the national debt more than double under Obama, to about $20 trillion. Is there a reason to suspect Hillary will rein in the exploding debt? Or will or continue it's geometric growth to perhaps $40 trillion while she crows about "cutting the deficit".
The US has been using debt-based growth since the 1980s, when trade went into deficit. That is no accounting trick; it's real debt. To pull it off, a massive consumer debt build-up over decades resulted. (Ignoring the dollar as trade currency for brevity.) A saner, but hardly panicked, approach to fair trade would be in good order; however, that means adjusting trade deals and rules, not wrecking entire frameworks.
Government deficit spending has also recently skyrocketed, although that is easier to bear over longer periods of time, especially if as a percent of GDP it remains low enough.
What really went missing in all this was the other side of Keynesian economics: to run a government surplus during years of growth in order to have a war chest for recessions. When under Clinton the heavy trend of deficit spending under Reaganism and its children (supply side tax cuts = deficit) was reversed and there was, lo and behold, a budding surplus... it was given away to all the rich friends of the political parties, both of them. No war chest for when the second massive bubble from Reagan deregulation burst, bigtime (the first was the S&L crisis in the 1980s,
yuuuge).
ETA: To be more on topic: Trump is toxic in light of the above. Like bombing a hospital to clear up the waiting lines.
Tax cuts and deregulation. One has led to increasing deficits by simple math, the other by creating such massive economic destruction that the bailouts created equally massive deficits. Thank you very much, both parties, but especially the supply-side, govt-is-a-distortion model-gazers. Good lord, save us from mythical thinking.
We've watched around 400,000 Syrians die with whatever our course is in that country. If Hillary continues on the same course, is 800,000 dead Syrians a few years from now acceptable?
Bush's Iraq II? But most importantly, the lesson is that the wars in the region are fueled by Islam meeting the modern world and not being able to adapt, plus infighting over religious purity. Or seen from another light: this is the first time that the nation-states set up by European powers after WWI have been tested, the borders redrawn. Best let those countries themselves deal with it; the US can only become a 'crusader' in local eyes by being active militarily. Why more blood for oil when the US has enough resources to be independent? Texas-Bush-Cheney-Haliburton-Saudis-Oil, maybe?
Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid and Obamacare are becoming a larger and larger problem, and together with exploding debt could figuratively bankrupt the country without some steps being taken. Will we be happy with 4 or 8 more years of Democratic "whistling past the graveyard" and the eventual collapse or severe curtailment of these programs?
Granted, no one is on the ball entirely. Were they, they would be redesigning the whole kit and kaboodle to be a guaranteed minimum income (GMI) system, with vastly less bureaucracy. There is a real labor surplus/dearth of quality positions, and will be in the foreseeable future, and a GMI is structurally the only sane approach. That, and maybe investing in large infrastructure projects buttressing city shore lines against rising oceans.
I'm NOT blindly assuming the Republicans could do a better job, nor that Trump has any articulable plans to deal with the above. Just that some Trump supporters see him as an alternative to a dystopian future that the envision Hillary leading them into. Which, in my book, perhaps makes them misguided - but hardly deserving of the invective heaped upon them by some here.
Any dystopian future certainly will be accelerated by creating Maginot lines and understanding the 21st century as a fancied-up early 20th. Time to get real, and that is a criticism of both candidates, and of today's electorate most of all.
Been sticking that head in the sand since Reagan, ignoring that any dreams of "greatness" were undermined in 1980, when cash flows from international trade turned permanently negative - military parades, dot.com booms, financial wizardry and yacht races notwithstanding. The real economic war is a cash flow war, and China has been winning for a very, very long time. The rest is bling and bragging rights.
