THE DEBT
The USA got its first president in 1789. Good old George Washington.
Two years later, the USA formally acknowledged that the Federal Government had a national debt of ~$75 million due to the expenses incurred to win the American Revolutionary War.
From the very beginning, the USA took its responsibilities to acknowledge and pay its debts very seriously. At the same time, we became comfortable with the idea that the national debt was a reasonable thing to manage.
As the nation's economy grew, the USA remained comfortable with a growing national debt.
The debt was $65 million in 1860, a rounding error. No big deal. Suddenly, however the debt was >$1 billion in 1863 and it reached $2.7 billion in 1864.
The Civil War got us used to the idea that debt could be expressing in billions. To hold the country together during and after the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln pushed debt to nearly 30% of GDP and created the first income tax in American history.
In the 1900's, the debt kept growing in a slow and steady manner and then World War 1 happened. We came out of that with ~$22 billion in national debt.
Wars, recessions and tax cuts had a way of causing the debt to jump up again and again. Politicians worried about the debt but passed budgets we could not pay for just about every year for two centuries. Republicans lamented the debt and yet, Republicans prioritized investing in the military and cutting taxes which is a combination that is guaranteed to increase the debt.
Democrats have always contended that the debt was just a fake big number that should never get in the way of funding stuff they like.
It's easy for Democrats to blame Republicans for the debt but that's a crazy oversimplification that isolates the president as if it was not Congress that passed every budget every year since the beginning - rarely with one party dominating the whole process.
The debt was just the debt. It was a nuisance for sure but never a crisis.
And then we went nuts. When Donald Trump took office, the USA was $19.5 trillion in debt. Four years later, when Biden took over, the debt was $26.9 trillion.
Somehow, the USA spent $7,400,000,000,000 more than it could pay for from taxes in just those four years. Jesus.
Trump served as president for 1.6% of the years when the USA was governed by a POTUS. Stunningly, TWENTY FIVE PERCENT of the national debt, a work in progress for 229 years, was accrued in just those four years.
Extraordinary tax cuts plus the conscious destruction of the IRS combined to slash tax income and that ran straight into a pandemic.
An extreme crisis is a good reason for Congress to start writing checks like drunken sailors. But. increased spending used to be partially offset through bills that raised taxes. (That was generous of me, Congress spends money like drunken sailors every damned day, they don't need a crisis.)
We can't blame this all on Donald Trump but it did not help that we had a president giving speeches that clearly showed that the POTUS had no idea what the difference between deficit spending and the national debt actually was. We had a president who thought that China had to pay for tariffs he created when everyone else who took economics in high school knew that the American citizens were being taxed through higher prices for Chinese products.
Huge tariffs installed quickly cause prices to jump up. Duh. That creates inflation. All of the increased costs for goods from China went to the Federal government. In a sane nation, that new revenue would help to balance the budget. Hahahaha. We live in America where new found money spilling into the hands of our Congress gets spent so fast that we never even realized it was there.
Whatever bias I bring to this, the debt has never been the problem because, since 1791, the USA has been 100% committed to always taking responsibility for the debt obligations.
It's not the debt, it's the DEFAULT that fucks us.