The Trump Deficit

[3point14]

If that's the worst thing you can come up with...

What's your point here.

Is it mainly that the massive deficit isn't Trump's to own? In which case, whose is it?

Or is your contention that a massive deficit isn't actually a problem?

 

[Squeegee Beckenheim]

If Trump is truly so horrible as people say, why do people keep having to stretch to ludicrous lengths to find examples of his horribleness?

I don't think people have to stretch to ludicrous lengths to find examples of him being horrible. Being a rapist is probably sufficient to put him in the "horrible" category. And that's just one example, without mentioning things like cozying up to and praising dictators, inciting racial hatred, advocating for violence against people he dislikes or who oppose him, etc.

But just because he's done things that everybody can agree makes him a horrible person doesn't imply that other things he's done cannot also be discussed. Are you seriously contending that it's only valid to discuss the very worst things he's done, and everything else is above criticism?

 

[johnny karate]

If Trump is truly so horrible as people say, why do people keep having to stretch to ludicrous lengths to find examples of his horribleness?

If that's the worst thing you can come up with...

The desperation is palpable.

 

[Archie Gemmill Goal]

Well, let me ask your opinion on this question. If I were looking for a fiscal conservative among the Democratic candidates who have announced that they are running for President, who would you recommend?





(Note: "Not as bad as Trump" isn't sufficient to qualify a candidate as fiscal conservative.)

What do you personally mean by a fiscal conservative might be a good place to start?

 

[Belz...]

If Trump is truly so horrible as people say (snip)

Didn't you say he was horrible?

 

[johnny karate]

Well, let me ask your opinion on this question. If I were looking for a fiscal conservative among the Democratic candidates who have announced that they are running for President, who would you recommend?





(Note: "Not as bad as Trump" isn't sufficient to qualify a candidate as fiscal conservative.)

If the proven track record of Democrats being more fiscally responsible than Republicans isn’t good enough for you, what response could anyone give that would be?

 

[ponderingturtle]

What do you personally mean by a fiscal conservative might be a good place to start?

Yea how much is it about balanced budgets and how much is it about cutting social programs at all costs? I mean I get it capitalism requires the poor be sacrificed as object lessons of what happens when you fail capitalism.

 

[lomiller]

How does that work? Congress has the sole authority to decide how much to spend and what to spend on. And the president's literal job is to spend the taxpayer's money, as directed by acts of Congress.

The budget proposal comes from the office of the President. Congress may make some modifications before voting on it but the end result is still subject to a presidential veto.

 

[lomiller]

W


(Note: "Not as bad as Trump" isn't sufficient to qualify a candidate as fiscal conservative.)

To early in the process to know, but Clinton is fiscally conservative and was the Democrat nomination last time. In spite of Republican claims Obama was relatively conservative as well and in fact so was every Democrat candidate going back to 1992. It’s reasonable to assume the nomination this time around will be fiscally conservative as well.

 

[Meadmaker]

What do you personally mean by a fiscal conservative might be a good place to start?

Good question. The phrase has morphed a lot over the years, and means different things to different people. For my part, what I mean is someone who takes the national debt seriously and makes balancing the budget, or at least reducing the deficit, a high priority.


A lot of people are willing to say that cutting taxes is a conservative position, but in my opinion that's balderdash. Everyone wants lower taxes. Someone who wants to cut taxes without cutting spending is not a fiscal conservate. He is just reckless with other people's money. (See, for example, Donald Trump)

 

[Meadmaker]

If the proven track record of Democrats being more fiscally responsible than Republicans isn’t good enough for you, what response could anyone give that would be?

A name of a Democrat currently running for president who is fiscally conservative, using any definition that you care to use.

 

[TurkeysGhost]

A name of a Democrat currently running for president who is fiscally conservative, using any definition that you care to use.

Bernie Sanders is pretty transparent about tax hikes to pay for increased social spending. Don't know if you would consider that fiscally conservative, but he's not proposing inflating the deficit.

 

[Meadmaker]

To early in the process to know, but Clinton is fiscally conservative and was the Democrat nomination last time. In spite of Republican claims Obama was relatively conservative as well and in fact so was every Democrat candidate going back to 1992. It’s reasonable to assume the nomination this time around will be fiscally conservative as well.

I don't see it. Clinton was promising middle class tax cuts. You can pick up some revenue with higher taxes on the rich, but if you push through middle class tax cuts at the same time, there's no revenue gain. I also didn't hear her calling for any spending cuts in any program. President Hilary Clinton may have become a fiscal conservative, but candidate Hilary Clinton was not.


President Bill Clinton was a fiscal conservative, at least in record. An awful lot of people don't think he would have been had it not been for Gingrich and Dole, but be that as it may, he had a very successful record from the viewpoint of a deficit hawk.

Obama? Not nearly as bad as Trump, but if you look at the actual record, you see lower taxes and greater spending. You could make a very good case that that was necessary during his first term because the economy was incredibly, horribly, bad, and stimulus was needed, but I think by his second term things had changed. To his credit, he changed a little, by letting some tax cuts expire and by "the sequestration", but the best he got to was a 600 billion dollar deficit. That's not so good.

 

[Meadmaker]

Bernie Sanders is pretty transparent about tax hikes to pay for increased social spending. Don't know if you would consider that fiscally conservative, but he's not proposing inflating the deficit.

Neither was Donald Trump, but the inevitable outcome of Trump's proposed policies was an inflated deficit. Bernie is the same way. He proposes moderate tax increases and large spending increases. Show me some numbers where they actually balance, and I would vote for him, but I don't think anyone can do that. I think his proposed social programs would be much more expensive than his proposed tax hikes would pay for.

 

[lomiller]

If the proven track record of Democrats being more fiscally responsible than Republicans isn’t good enough for you, what response could anyone give that would be?

This, and the reason is obvious when you look at how the US budget process works.

Most of the US budget is mandatory spending, things like Medicare and Social Security where the legal authority and requirement to spend this money has been in place for decades. Unless Congress changes existing laws, neither the President of Congress have any control over how much this costs. The Actuaries working for the President add up the numbers reports them to congress and that’s that.
This makes up $3.1 Trillion of the $4.4 Trillion the US Government has budgeted for 2019.

The remaining $1.3 Trillion is discretionary spending, but there are two types.
Military spending, which uses multi-year appropriations so most of it doesn’t need to be re-approved by Congress every year. This is budgeted for ~$700 Billion in 2019
Non-military, which is basically everything else. This is what Congress debates and approves each year but it only makes up $600 Billion of the $4.4 Trillion US budget. While it’s not military spending it does include significant amounts of defence related spending primarily the VA and Dept of Homeland Security but about half the budget for the Dept of Energy is defence related as well.

So:
1) Mandatory Spending = $3100 Billion
Neither party changes this much and voters strongly support it and don’t want cuts.

2) Military and Defence related spending = ~$900 Billion
Democrats generally prefer to hold the line, Republicans usually want increases > the rate of inflation sometimes significantly. Voters generally don’t like cuts but are usually mixed on expansion.

3) Non-defence discretionary spending = ~$400 Billion
Democrats usually request modest increases Republicans generally request cuts. Voters either approve of most of it and/or approve of the money they personally benefit from. Voters also like promises that cuts will be made without cutting the stuff they like, but since someone likes almost all of it so actual cuts are seldom popular.

What typically happens in the yearly budget
Republicans want 5%-10% increases to #2 and usually get it ($50-$100 Bn per year increase)
Democrats want 5% increases to #3 Republicans want 5% cuts. After everyone gets their own stuff It goes up 2% - 5% per year. ($10-$20 Bn per year increase)


Overall most of the yearly spending increases can be attributed to Republicans preferences mainly because they support increase to defence related spending that makes up 2/3 of all discretionary spending. But the overall increase isn’t really that large

Where the deficits actually come from isn’t spending but in fact is almost all Republican sponsored tax cuts but ~$350 Billion of every years deficit comes from the unfunded Republican expansion of Medicaid back in 2004. The current deficit is ~3X the value of all non-Defence discretionary spending combined, so clearly spending cuts to this are will not even scratch it. It's reached a point where even deep cuts to defense related spending can't fix the issue either and voters don't want this things anyway. A fairly significant tax increased is the only realistic approach.

 

[ponderingturtle]

I don't see it. Clinton was promising middle class tax cuts. You can pick up some revenue with higher taxes on the rich, but if you push through middle class tax cuts at the same time, there's no revenue gain. I also didn't hear her calling for any spending cuts in any program. President Hilary Clinton may have become a fiscal conservative, but candidate Hilary Clinton was not.


President Bill Clinton was a fiscal conservative, at least in record. An awful lot of people don't think he would have been had it not been for Gingrich and Dole, but be that as it may, he had a very successful record from the viewpoint of a deficit hawk.

Obama? Not nearly as bad as Trump, but if you look at the actual record, you see lower taxes and greater spending. You could make a very good case that that was necessary during his first term because the economy was incredibly, horribly, bad, and stimulus was needed, but I think by his second term things had changed. To his credit, he changed a little, by letting some tax cuts expire and by "the sequestration", but the best he got to was a 600 billion dollar deficit. That's not so good.

What was he supposed to do with the republican controlled congress?

Yes democrats are more effective at balancing the budget than republicans, but fiscal conservative has been taken over by cutting taxes and regulation at all costs. For a democrat campaigning as a fiscal conservative seems like poor marketing. As to a lot of the base it says cutting social programs and killing of the poor 49% that Romney hated like the elderly.

Hell look at Paul Ryan who fantasized about killing off medicare for decades as one of the supposedly biggest fiscal conservatives there was in his marketing.

The term simply does not say to people what you want it to, even if that is a more technically correct definition.

 

[Segnosaur]

I don't see it. Clinton was promising middle class tax cuts. You can pick up some revenue with higher taxes on the rich, but if you push through middle class tax cuts at the same time, there's no revenue gain. I also didn't hear her calling for any spending cuts in any program. President Hilary Clinton may have become a fiscal conservative, but candidate Hilary Clinton was not.

I guess the question is whether such spending cuts would have been necessary.

A revenue-neutral tax change (tax cuts for middle class/tax increases on the wealthy) would have kept the same amount of money coming in. And the economy was already growing under Obama, so even if she didn't cut spending the deficit probably would have continued to drop due to simple economic expansion.

 

[lomiller]

Hell look at Paul Ryan who fantasized about killing off medicare for decades as one of the supposedly biggest fiscal conservatives there was in his marketing.

He is personally in favor of such cuts, but Realistically Seniors are one of the largest Republican voting blocks so they will never make real cuts to programmes seniors support. Democrats and ~80% of the US population overall strongly oppose real cuts to these programs so they probably won’t happen.

On occasion, Republicans have tried to sneak in cuts in ways that don’t look like cuts but these usually don’t pass either.

 

[ponderingturtle]

He is personally in favor of such cuts, but Realistically Seniors are one of the largest Republican voting blocks so they will never make real cuts to programmes seniors support. Democrats and ~80% of the US population overall strongly oppose real cuts to these programs so they probably won’t happen.

On occasion, Republicans have tried to sneak in cuts in ways that don’t look like cuts but these usually don’t pass either.

Which is the point of running up the deficit, to force those cuts to be made.

 

[TurkeysGhost]

Neither was Donald Trump, but the inevitable outcome of Trump's proposed policies was an inflated deficit. Bernie is the same way. He proposes moderate tax increases and large spending increases. Show me some numbers where they actually balance, and I would vote for him, but I don't think anyone can do that. I think his proposed social programs would be much more expensive than his proposed tax hikes would pay for.

Perhaps that is so, but the general principle of "increase taxes to support increased spending" is at least sound. Maybe Bernie isn't willing to be realistic about how much those taxes would have to increase, but the general concept of raising funds for increased expenses was there.

Trump's rationale was just lip service. Not even Republicans buy the idea of the Laffer curve anymore. No one honestly believed that the Trump tax cuts would goose the economy enough to cover the deficit generated, including Trump. The tax cut was a transparent move to decrease taxes at the expense of the deficit growing.