Despite all the sound and fury over DOGE, non-interest payments rose in fiscal year 2025. Corporate income tax collections decreased by 15% while consumer prices continued to rise. Interest on the debt exceeded $1 trillion for the first (but not last) time.
The national debt continues to rise
- Thread starter bamacpa
- Start date
Despite all the sound and fury over DOGE, non-interest payments rose in fiscal year 2025. Corporate income tax collections decreased by 15% while consumer prices continued to rise. Interest on the debt exceeded $1 trillion for the first (but not last) time.
just like the importance of the president’s “mental acuityâ€Â, it’s no longer an issue
I remember when Trump tried desperately to get the Debt Ceiling raised in Oct/ November before he took office so they could do this and claim it was the previous administration's fault. Wasn't able to overcome opposition in his own party so they had to do it after he was inauguated. He has to own this.
My conspiracy theory is that they are going to keep borrowing trillions of dollars on the taxpayers' card (that's you and me: billionaires are tax avoiders/cheats) to give to billionaires. They can't control the Bond Market forever but, like using one credit card to pay off another, they can stave off the day of reckoning for a while. They are using Tariffs as a fig leaf to say: "See, we have a method for paying service on the debt without raising taxes".
The scam won't work forever, though. It's gonna make 2008 look like boom times.
but on the good side, we sent argentina $20billion to prove libertarianism totally works
I bet that in exchange for $XXX billion towards Trump's
First, the national debt and the deficit are two different things.
The national debt is the accumulation of debt over 250 years. The deficit is the ongoing annual addition to that total debt.
Second, the Republicans and Democrats are culpable in both. Neither has done a serious thing about reducing the debt or the deficit since Clinton in the early 90s. We can debate who did what first and/or the most. But neither is anywhere remotely clean on this point.
Third, there are two balrogs to address. Social Security and Medicare. So long as the speaker addresses anything other than these two points, they're pandering to their base.
DOGE was never anything more than political strutting. The numbers to be gained by cutting personnel in an admittedly bloated federal bureaucracy pale in comparison to Social Security and Medicare.
I don't object to streamlining the federal payroll. But expecting personnel cuts to address the deficit (let alone the national debt), is kind of like thinking a rain shower will turn the Sahara Desert into Alabama's Black Belt.
The national debt is the accumulation of debt over 250 years. The deficit is the ongoing annual addition to that total debt.
Second, the Republicans and Democrats are culpable in both. Neither has done a serious thing about reducing the debt or the deficit since Clinton in the early 90s. We can debate who did what first and/or the most. But neither is anywhere remotely clean on this point.
Third, there are two balrogs to address. Social Security and Medicare. So long as the speaker addresses anything other than these two points, they're pandering to their base.
DOGE was never anything more than political strutting. The numbers to be gained by cutting personnel in an admittedly bloated federal bureaucracy pale in comparison to Social Security and Medicare.
I don't object to streamlining the federal payroll. But expecting personnel cuts to address the deficit (let alone the national debt), is kind of like thinking a rain shower will turn the Sahara Desert into Alabama's Black Belt.
Eventually the Dismal Science will address all of this for us. Nobody is going to like the solution, but it will happen.
National Debt = Sum Total of all the ANNUAL DEFICITS
Yes, and as I've noted here, Clinton's "accomplishment" was a complete fluke anyway. He only got it because the voters stood up at town halls and knocked down his $1T the first decade attempt at socialized medicine. Plus, I love how he ignores that his own party pulled the same "Lucy holding the football" trick they love, immediate tax increases with "later" spending cuts that never happen - they only happened this time because of the wipeout at the 1994 midterms, and Gingrich and Dole felt, "Meh, you passed these cuts, we'll take them."
What I'm saying is, sure, we can give Clinton credit for the one four-year accident that happened, but it only happened because of things he actually opposed being forced on him.
Theatrics that are a sound and a fury signifying nothing.
But what I honestly wonder is this: how much of our deficit has to do with people living longer and thus deriving more of a benefit than was presumed originally from Social Security and Medicare (which, of course, did not exist in 1935)? I recall seeing a show back around 1993 showing that when FDR originally passed SS, the projections were that by 1980 it would cost the government about $6B per year. And then in 1980, it cost about $290B per year, which is one helluva miscalculation (and again - that doesn't even include Medicare or Medicaid that came later).
=========================
Look, I think it's surely possible to have too much fixation on the deficit. Not that it isn't important, but - and you've forgotten more about money than I'll ever know - circumstances sometimes impose themselves so that even the best laid plans cannot happen. Presidents (and Congress) are not clairvoyants. A President can be sitting down to agree to budget deficit reduction with the other party (1990 Bush-Foley-Mitchell) and while the negotiations are ongoing be pushed into spending unplanned billions on a war to liberate
Carter's party ran the entire show his four years, but his deficits ranged between $59B and $79B.
But Carter was also the victim of the inflation caused by both LBJ's social programs and Vietnam War, because the Big Texan was loathe to raise taxes as his unpopularity increased. And while I think some of the criticism of Reagan's early policies are fair, it should also be remembered that unemployment skyrocketed, which made already bad numbers even worse. Obama got us some trillion dollar deficits - but what was he supposed to do when he walked into two wars and a crashed economy? I think Trump was a colossal disaster (and his party, too) on the 2017 tax cut and spending - but we have to spot both Trump and Biden a bit of grace with the pandemic, too.
* - note that FDR did have a balanced budget in the wake of the 1937 Recession, but the national debt still increased by $1 billion that year.
The goal of leadership should be to leave it better than you found it. We have abandoned that lesson a long time ago.
I agree.
But that leads to a serious question: how do we determine that?
Did LBJ leave it better with social programs like Medicare/Medicaid and the CRA and VRA or was the damage to American trust in government and injury/death due to the Vietnam War enough to undo the good? Or was it a mixed bag? (Probably).
Is the fact - and it is a fact, not an opinion - that both unemployment and inflation came way, way down during Reagan's Presidency a bigger plus than the egregious budget deficit? Unemployment went from 7.4% in Feb 1981 to almost 11% in December 1982 and then went all the way down to 5.1% as Reagan left office. Inflation went from 11.4% to 4.8% during his eight years. (I know some Democrats like to go with the "but Paul Volcker did that" argument, which is fine. But then Reagan gets credit for the Clinton boom since he's the one who appointed Alan Greenspan, too). And can the deficit be viewed as a wartime deficit (always higher) due to the Cold War and our eventual "victory' or is there a more correct interpretation? (We can legitimately complain about lower taxes on the rich but was that a smarter move long-term as we moved to a global economy and thus kept investment here - or not?). Again, a mixed bag, but Presidents have to meet the near-term politics first. The budget deficit was the issue upon which most people were disappointed in Reagan's Presidency in a poll at the end of it.
I think it can be said Clinton left the country better than he found it. Maybe. After all, despite his "sky is falling" rhetoric on the 1992 economy, he inherited one growing at 4.8%, so how much personal credit he deserves for it is open to question. On the other hand, however it happened, he DID accomplish budget surpluses for a few years. But he also helped drive the opinion of the public even lower on politicians with all his dissembling in the Lewinsky scandal. It would have been better for him to simply admit it, ask forgiveness, apologize, and move on. He was already in his second term and would never face the voters again, but the fact remains the President did commit perjury and obstruction of justice, too. And there was no reason for it. The country forgave Reagan when he admitted selling arms to Iran, they absolutely would have forgiven the President for surrendering to a common temptation.
The last four Presidents, I'm not so sure - for various reasons. Bush plunged us into a financial abyss both domestically and with his two wars, Obama passed a health care act that clearly is NOT affordable (and thus subsidized), no comment is necessary on 45/47, and Biden's shameless widespread pardon of his corrupt offspring isn't mitigated by his foresight in pardoning others to prevent Trump prosecution.
And let's not even get started on the fact he will go down in history, as Maher rightly notes, as "Ruth Bader Biden," the guy who hung around too long.
I think we would better off if we're in an era where Congress, collectively, wields the power it has. Im not sure where we got off those rails but Congress has been pandering to the President for way too long and it's made us worse off as a nation.
As a reminder, Krysten Sinema voted with the Democrats 93% of the time - and they went after her, pushed her out the party and right now they're hypocritically using the filibuster they said needed to be gone - and she saved them from themselves (and she delights in pointing it out to them, too). Liz Cheney voted with the Republicans (and Donald Trump) that same 93% of the time - and got voted out, too, as her own party turned on her. Amazingly enough, Tim Kaine votes with his party "only" 89% of the time, which was somehow good enough to be second banana to Hillary. And several others including Coons, Klobuchar, Murphy, Shaheen, and Hassan vote less with the Ds than Sinema did (at the time she was in the party).
If voting with "my side" 18.5 out of every 20 times isn't considered a loyal enough, I guess it's easy to see why nobody will take the occasional venture into independence.
I agree.
Trouble is, not only has Congress ceded power through inaction, in some cases (like tariffs) they have done so with actual legislation delegating power to the President.
And yes, Congress could take it back. But no President, red or blue, would ever voluntarily give up power. So you'd have to override a veto. Which takes 2/3 of both houses. Which will never happen.
Question for anyone: When's the last time Congress overrode a veto? I honestly don't know.
Apparently it was at the end of Trump's first term:
https://www.defensenews.com/congres...ongress-overrides-trump-veto-of-defense-bill/
Congress overrides Trump veto of defense bill
Congress has overridden President Donald Trump’s veto of a defense policy bill, a first by lawmakers since he took office nearly four years ago.
In an extraordinary New Year’s Day session, the Republican-controlled Senate easily turned aside the veto, dismissing Trump’s objections to the $740 billion bill and handing him a stinging rebuke just weeks before his term ends.
Interesting. Congress got a spine at a point where it looked like Trump was done.
Now that he's not done, the spine turned to jelly.
It'll be interesting to see what happens in the second half of his second term.
The national debt hasn’t been accumulating for quite 250 years. Andrew Jackson actually got the debt paid off completely in 1835.
By the way - and I had heard this years ago, but this shows it in black and white - while it is true that we ran a surplus for four years under Clinton, here's the other truth: the national debt STILL INCREASED in those four years. So even the surplus didn't do much except keep the debt from rising as quickly as it had been. Granted, it grew by slightly less than 100B per year, but it still grew.
U.S. Budget Deficit by Year
YEAR - DEFICIT - DEBT INCREASE
1998 - (69B surplus) - 113B
1999 - (126B surplus) - 130B
2000 - (236B surplus) - 18B
2001 - (128B surplus) - 133B
U.S. Budget Deficit by Year
YEAR - DEFICIT - DEBT INCREASE
1998 - (69B surplus) - 113B
1999 - (126B surplus) - 130B
2000 - (236B surplus) - 18B
2001 - (128B surplus) - 133B
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