Civility, Principles, Decorum, Deficit, Debt & Other GOP Hits, Fake It ’till You Make It, God Bless the USA Bible, Project 2025, State of the Union Rebuttal, Trump ’25-Make America Corrupt, Trump Absurdities, Voter Motivations, Voters: DUI or Asleep??
DEBT, DEFICIT, & OTHER GOP HITS
To the average person, the current devolution of American Politics is just another day of nonsense building on yet another day, until it’s a week, a month, a year, etc. But to someone who has devoted a lifetime to politics and trying to get the right people in, and then getting them to do the right things, and calling out the ones who failed during legislative committee hearings and/or budget hearings, the devolution is far more insidious and the wake of that devolution brings with it catastrophic collateral damage not just at home, but abroad as well.
Take for example the debate of national debt and the deficit…two entirely different issues, but used interchangeably by politicians to deliberately confuse the average citizen.
Every industrialized nation has “sovereign debt” …just like in your own household. If you buy a car or a house, more often than not, you finance it. THAT is debt. And if you are a country, it is called SOVEREIGN DEBT. If you buy a $30,000 car and $250,000 house, then you have a debt of $280,000. If you make $70,000 a year in salary, then you have a deficit of $210,000 (cost of debt minus income equals surplus or deficit).
In Bill Clinton’s last year, he turned over a surplus of nearly $500 Billion. Two years later, George W. Bush turned that surplus into a $2 Trillion deficit, but we were responding to the 9/11 attack on our country and beginning a war in the mid-east in response.
Trump quadrupled the debt in just 4 years in office, even before Covid hit in his final year. His tax giveaway to the wealthy and big corporations cost the country over $2 trillion dollars of revenue. The Republican controlled Senate and House eagerly passed the bill and simply lifted the debt ceiling repeatedly to accommodate the tax giveaways to the wealthy without so much as a whimper…. until Joe Biden came on the scene. It wasn’t long before the silent majority became the minority cacophony…. Bemoaning the debt despite having already passed the appropriations bills that had the spending plans in there.
In the example at the beginning, with the car and house debt, the debt and deficit are predicated on the notion that you are paying everything today and your entire income is coming in today, but that is NOT how real life works…not for you…and not for the government. Instead, you go to a bank and get a loan for the car, and a mortgage for the house. As a result, you pay a little each month for each item…and you RECEIVE your income the same way…a little each week or bi week or month (depending on your company’s payroll practices. So to say you are in a $210,000 deficit is misleading without the context. In reality, your income would be $1,346.34 weekly, $2,692.31 bi-weekly or $5833.34 on a monthly basis. A $30,000 car loan putting $1,000 down and paying 7.5% and rolling tags, taxes, and registration into the car loan would cost around $750 a month and the mortgage of $250,000 and interest at 7.67% would be $1776 a month… the result is a $2526 a month mortgage and car payment against a $5833.34 a month income…hardly the dire deficit a first glance would seem to indicate, in fact, if house mortgage and car payment were your only expenses, your $210,000 deficit is actually a $3,307.34 a month ($39,688.08 annual) surplus!
The federal government is not much different, except they sell their debt as sovereign debt bonds and they pay a small amount of interest on those bonds but they were ALWAYS considered safe. SO countries and private people would by government bonds (pieces of our debt) and knew that they would never lose their money but would get a little interest on their investment without fail. And we had a AAA credit rating to prove it…. until the current crop of Republican rancor and grandstanding over the debt ceiling and their continued deficit spending rhetoric endangered those investments by threatening a government shutdown…that all to often used GOP strategy to strangle Democratic policy initiatives the GOP doesn’t like when they are in the minority. It has gotten so predictable, and so reckless, that credit agencies have downgraded our once stellar rating costing taxpayers MORE money in increased debt service payments because credit downgrades change the preferred interest rates to more expensive ones. Thank you Freedom Caucus and extremist GOP members like Jordan, Gaetz, Taylor Greene and Boebert. While the bellyache on nonsense and distorted truths, their actions alone are costing American taxpayers everyday.
Under Biden, America’s GDP is 22% in his first THREE years (one which was the Covid nightmare inherited from Trump who had it in his last year.). In contrast, Trump realized only a 14% GDP average over FOUR years with only his last year dealing with Covid. At the same time, Biden actually has REDUCED the deficit while Trump INCREASED it. When your income goes up more than 50%, as GDP would indicate, and your debt does not go up as steeply, THAT is when you see deficit numbers start to fall as you do in Biden’s case. Yet, to hear the Conservative pundits, the economy is failing under Biden, he has increased the National debt and his policies aren’t working. To hell with the facts and the data that proves otherwise.
But there is ONE looming catastrophe neither side is addressing. The impending implosion of Social Security and Medicare and the $10 trillion deficit that should be showing up in deficit discussions but neither side shows because it is an expense that is not actually entitled according to some politicians. But that is for my next article.