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Subject: Re: Illinois village plunged into debt by reckless black mayor as her outrageous credit card spending is revealed
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Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2024 03:31:57 -0000 (UTC)
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>An Illinois village has been plunged into millions of dollars of debt by 
>its mayor's outrageous credit card spending, an investigation has 
>revealed.
>

He's a republican.  All republicans are careless spenders.   They don't 
even pay lip service to debt reduction now.

A Closer Look
Donald Trump Built a National Debt So Big (Even Before the Pandemic) That 
It’ll Weigh Down the Economy for Years

The “King of Debt” promised to reduce the national debt — then his tax cuts 
made it surge. Add in the pandemic, and he oversaw the third-biggest 
deficit increase of any president.

by Allan Sloan, ProPublica, and Cezary Podkul for ProPublica Jan. 14, 2021, 
5 a.m. EST
President Donald Trump promised to reduce the national debt but instead 
increased it. It is now at its highest level relative to the U.S. economy 
since the end of World War II. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)

Series: A Closer Look

Examining the News

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign 
up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

This story was co-published with The Washington Post.

One of President Donald Trump’s lesser known but profoundly damaging 
legacies will be the explosive rise in the national debt that occurred on 
his watch. The financial burden that he’s inflicted on our government will 
wreak havoc for decades, saddling our kids and grandkids with debt.

The national debt has risen by almost $7.8 trillion during Trump’s time in 
office. That’s nearly twice as much as what Americans owe on student loans, 
car loans, credit cards and every other type of debt other than mortgages, 
combined, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. It 
amounts to about $23,500 in new federal debt for every person in the 
country.

The growth in the annual deficit under Trump ranks as the third-biggest 
increase, relative to the size of the economy, of any U.S. presidential 
administration, according to a calculation by a leading Washington budget 
maven, Eugene Steuerle, co-founder of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy 
Center. And unlike George W. Bush and Abraham Lincoln, who oversaw the 
larger relative increases in deficits, Trump did not launch two foreign 
conflicts or have to pay for a civil war.
The National Debt Increased Under Trump Despite His Promise to Reduce It

Daily total national debt from 2009 to present.
Source: U.S. Treasury (Lena V. Groeger/ProPublica)

Economists agree that we needed massive deficit spending during the COVID-
19 crisis to ward off an economic cataclysm, but federal finances under 
Trump had become dire even before the pandemic. That happened even though 
the economy was booming and unemployment was at historically low levels. By 
the Trump administration’s own description, the pre-pandemic national debt 
level was already a “crisis” and a “grave threat.”

The combination of Trump’s 2017 tax cut and the lack of any serious 
spending restraint helped both the deficit and the debt soar. So when the 
once-in-a-lifetime viral disaster slammed our country and we threw more 
than $3 trillion into COVID-19-related stimulus, there was no longer any 
margin for error.

Our national debt has reached immense levels relative to our economy, 
nearly as high as it was at the end of World War II. But unlike 75 years 
ago, the massive financial overhang from Medicare and Social Security will 
make it dramatically more difficult to dig ourselves out of the debt ditch.
The Debt to GDP Ratio Is the Highest It's Been Since World War II

Federal debt held by the public as a percentage of gross domestic product 
since 1900.
Source: Congressional Budget Office (Lena V. Groeger/ProPublica)

Falling deeper into the red is the opposite of what Trump, the self-styled 
“King of Debt,” said would happen if he became president. In a March 31, 
2016, interview with Bob Woodward and Robert Costa of The Washington Post, 
Trump said he could pay down the national debt, then about $19 trillion, 
“over a period of eight years” by renegotiating trade deals and spurring 
economic growth.

After he took office, Trump predicted that economic growth created by the 
2017 tax cut, combined with the proceeds from the tariffs he imposed on a 
wide range of goods from numerous countries, would help eliminate the 
budget deficit and let the U.S. begin to pay down its debt. On July 27, 
2018, he told Sean Hannity of Fox News: “We have $21 trillion in debt. When 
this [the 2017 tax cut] really kicks in, we’ll start paying off that debt 
like it’s water.”

Nine days later, he tweeted, “Because of Tariffs we will be able to start 
paying down large amounts of the $21 trillion in debt that has been 
accumulated, much by the Obama Administration.”

That’s not how it played out. When Trump took office in January 2017, the 
nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office was projecting that federal budget 
deficits would be 2% to 3% of our gross domestic product during Trump’s 
term. Instead, the deficit reached nearly 4% of gross domestic product in 
2018 and 4.6% in 2019.

There were multiple culprits. Trump’s tax cuts, especially the sharp 
reduction in the corporate tax rate to 21% from 35%, took a big bite out of 
federal revenue. The CBO estimated in 2018 that the tax cut would increase 
deficits by about $1.9 trillion over 11 years.

Meanwhile, Trump’s claim that increased revenue from the tariffs would help 
eliminate (or at least reduce) our national debt hasn’t panned out. In 
2018, Trump’s administration began hiking tariffs on aluminum, steel and 
many other products, launching what became a global trade war with China, 
the European Union and other countries.

The tariffs did bring in additional revenue. In fiscal 2019, they netted 
about $71 billion, up about $36 billion from President Barack Obama’s last 
year in office. But although $36 billion is a lot of money, it’s less than 
1/750th of the national debt. That $36 billion could have covered a bit 
more than three weeks of interest on the national debt — that is, had Trump 
not unilaterally decided to send a chunk of the tariff revenue to farmers 
affected by his trade wars. Businesses that struggled as a result of the 
tariffs also paid fewer taxes, offsetting some of the increased tariff 
revenue.

By early 2019, the national debt had climbed to $22 trillion. Trump’s 
budget proposal for 2020 called it a “grave threat to our economic and 
societal prosperity” and asserted that the U.S. was experiencing a 
“national debt crisis.” However, that same budget proposal included 
substantial growth in the national debt.

By the end of 2019, the debt had risen to $23.2 trillion and more federal 
officials were sounding the alarm. “Not since World War II has the country 
seen deficits during times of low unemployment that are as large as those 
that we project — nor, in the past century, has it experienced large 
deficits for as long as we project,” Phillip Swagel, director of the CBO, 
said in January 2020.

Weeks later, COVID-19 erupted and made the financial situation far worse. 
As of Dec. 31, 2020, the national debt had jumped to $27.75 trillion, up 
39% from $19.95 trillion when Trump was sworn in. The government ended its 
2020 fiscal year with the portion of the national debt owed to investors, 
the metric favored by the CBO, at around 100% of GDP. The CBO had predicted 
less than a year earlier that it would take until 2030 to reach that 
approximate level of debt. Including the trillions owed to various 
governmental trust funds, the total debt is now about 130% of GDP.

Normally, this is where we’d give you Trump’s version of events. But we 
couldn’t get anyone to give us Trump’s side. Judd Deere, a White House 
spokesman, referred us to the Office of Management and Budget, which is a 
branch of the White House.

OMB didn’t respond to our requests. The Treasury directed us to comments 
made by OMB director Russell Vought in October, in which he predicted that 
as the pandemic eases and economic growth rebounds, the “fiscal picture” 
will improve. The OMB blamed legislators for deficits when Trump submitted 
his proposed 2021 budget: “Unfortunately, the Congress continues to reject 
any efforts to restrain spending. Instead, they have greatly contributed to 
the continued ballooning of Federal debt and deficits, putting the Nation’s 
fiscal future at risk.”

Still, the deficit growth under Trump has been historic. Steuerle, of the 
Tax Policy Center, has done a comparison of every American president using 
a metric called the “primary deficit.” It’s defined as the deficit minus 
interest costs, because interest is the only budget expense that presidents 
and Congress can’t control unless they want to do the unthinkable and 
default on the debt. Steuerle examined the records of 45 presidents to see 
how the primary deficit had shrunk or grown relative to the size of the 
economy between the first and final years of each president’s 
administration.

Trump had the third-biggest primary deficit growth, 5.2% of GDP, behind 
only George W. Bush (11.7%) and Abraham Lincoln (9.4%). Bush, of course, 
not only passed a big tax cut, as Trump has, but also launched two wars, 
which greatly inflated the defense budget. Lincoln had to pay for the Civil 
War. By contrast, Trump’s wars have been almost entirely of the political 
variety.

Our national debt is now at its highest level relative to our economy since 
the end of World War II. After the war ended, the extraordinary military 
expenses disappeared, a postwar recovery began and the debt began to fall 
rapidly relative to the size of the economy.

But that’s not going to happen this time. When World War II ended 75 years 
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