You can't attribute any of this to a singular administration or party even. Maybe I shouldn't word that as such, but people get caught up in pointing the finger, but don't consider everything that contributes to such things.

You get a spike around the 08 bubble, fine. We all acknowledge that, but my point being, there is a TON that fed into that, years, even decades prior (some say starting in the 80s). You get a ton of families borrowing for houses they can't afford (didn't start immediately prior to 08), you create a dangerous trend, starts changing our culture/middle class dynamic and soon you have all these people living outside of their means.

I'll grant most of you probably are better read and can spout more statistics, but a lot of this sounds short sighted and like children wanting to pass the buck onto one another because maybe of blind allegiance to a party, how silly, or perhaps willful ignorance.

In the long run, interest payments for a huge debt will eat into the budget and restrict the government more and more. We've seen this with countries like Greece and Argentina, but also Italy and Spain.
The United States are huuuuge and I believe they will be able to go to a debt north of $30trillion before this becomes an issue, but at some point, things start going downhill very quickly.

Inflation can melt down a mountain of public debt, yes, but at the expense of the people. It is their loss in pensions, bank accounts and overall purchasing power that pays off the debt in case of heavy inflation.




True, but again: bringing the deficit down to $450bn per year during a thriving economy like Obama did is not NEARLY enough.



Also true. Therefore, the best way to reduce the debt burden is strong and sustained growth coupled with responsible public spending. The big question, however, is whether such a "strong yet not deficit-driven" growth is even attainable anymore in this day and age in a highly developed country.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Aug 5 2018 02:47pm

You can use that website I linked to make custom charts. For any amount of years, showing just about any govt. financial data.

If you find a chart you like, just click on it, then you can adjust the years span etc. Unfortunately the customized charts don't have a usable image link, so screen shot in necessary.


/e

https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/

This post was edited by Ghot on Aug 5 2018 02:46pm

Couldn't agree more here. Either side panders to their respective audiences, nothing of note changes, government grows, debt ceiling grows, and they continue their cycle.

Gotta be a push for shrinking the government, drastic cut to the defense budget, and government programs/agencies need to be independently audited.

I mean, yeah, it depends what you classify as "big". An arbitrarily large debt will eat an economy, but an arbitrarily large deficit will create a large debt and then you still have to stop the deficit before tackling the debt.

As long as your growth is less than your interest rate, then every year you don't add to the debt you make it smaller relative to your economy. Honestly, I think the best strategy for tackling the current debt is to balance the budget and then just ignore the debt as growth outstrips it. As long as our growth is less than the interest, we win every year we don't add to it. It's the not adding to it that is the issue.

This post was edited by Thor123422 on Aug 5 2018 02:53pm

You can't attribute all of it to a single administration or party and no one said you could, but that doesn't mean certain administrations haven't contributed to the deficit and debt proportionally more, or whether the economic conditions at the time which influenced it are insignificant.

While there were undoubtedly structural issues in the financial system dating back 30+ years that we can't assign blame to easily, to then say that everyone contributed and thus implying that we can't hold administrations to account for it is intellectually lazy.

uh.. with "growth", do you mean the economy or the debt here? I dont see how an economic growth rate below the interest rate would make things better.



Agreed, that's also my line of thinking. Although a small deficit might be ok as well as long as the economic growth is solid; which in turn means that some deficit spending is reasonable if it creates added value. So for example, infrastructure spending which is done efficiently (no overpaying, only building roads and bridges that will actually be used a lot, and so on...) could be a sensible thing and reduce the debt long-term, even if it adds to the deficit in the short-term.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Aug 5 2018 03:02pm

The problem with that is, if you allow the high levels of debt in the medium-long term it will reduce the options the government can take, in terms of monetary and fiscal policy, to combat the next recession when it hits.

Another issue in running a balanced budget is there will be no net contribution to the economy from the government, so assuming there will be similar level growth rates to when the deficit was $1tr is not empirically supported.

This post was edited by dro94 on Aug 5 2018 03:17pm

There are multiple ways you can take it. You can have oscillating positive or negative income, where you pay down the debt during good years and stimulate during bad years, or you can have a flat rate where you just always take in what you need and don't spend any more. In the former the government would make up the slack with deficit spending during a recession and then pull back to pay that off during good times.

The only way the government can have a net contribution is if they do it through deficit spending (or by just saving a surplus and doing nothing with it, but that never happens so we'll ignore it), which isn't indefinitely sustainable. So at one point or another you'll have to either have a balanced budget and carry a debt, or pay off the debt and have a net negative contribution that balances out the positive contribution.

You could also just use charts to make your argument.