Norbert Haupt

Now that the Trump administration is coming to an end, and Republicans have lost control of the Senate, we can be sure that the political right will all of a sudden start focusing on the national debt, and will blame the Biden administration for spending money like “drunken sailors” every step of the way. I predict that the debt ceiling, a word that never even was uttered in the last four years, will be a continuing battle, and  every time we want to do something for the middle class we’ll be told that we “can’t afford it, look at the debt!”

Here is the reality of the debt:

As can be seen from this chart, the debt went from about $10T to $20T under Obama, headed off by the 2008 stimulus bill, and steadily increased over the years.

Then when Trump took over, he promised that he’d eliminate the debt over eight years. That did not happen. The graph, as we can see above, continued right on upward at the same slope as during the Obama years. The Trump tax cut put a little spike into it, but in general, it does not seem to have affected  the slope of the increase much at all.

Of course, then came the pandemic and all bets are off about the long-term result and the slope of that curve.

In summary, Trump did not do anything to reduce the debt, let alone eliminate it. But overall, he didn’t increase it beyond the trajectory that was already underway.