Make America's deficits great again

[CJD]

(10-10-2019, 09:30 PM)GMDino Wrote: I should probably fact check this first...but it seems right.  

Looking at jobs and deficits

Reagan: 15M jobs
$79B to $159B

Bush: 2M jobs
$153B to $255B

Clinton: 23M jobs
$255B to $128B surplus

Bush 1.5M jobs
$128B surplus to $1T debt

Obama 12M jobs
1.16T to $585B

Trump 5M jobs
$585B to $1.1T

Hate for this to go viral#TrumpMinneapolis

— ️?? Christopher Zullo (@ChrisJZullo) October 10, 2019

 

I was actually just talking to one of my conservative friends about this yesterday. Those numbers are pretty much what the website I used said.

https://www.thebalance.com/us-deficit-by-year-3306306

The person in this tweet does seem to subtly switch from deficit to debt increase for that fiscal year once they got to W though.

I personally don't know exactly what the difference between deficit and debt increase is (you'd think they'd be the same), but the above website does specify between the two. For the first 3 presidents, the tweet runs right down the 2nd column, but when it gets to Bush, they jump to the third column to get that 1 trillion debt figure.

Then for Obama, it looks like they jumped back to deficit. 

I don't know if this was done intentionally because the deficit figure for the last year of Bush's presidency (459 billion) was not extreme enough and they wanted it to be higher than where Obama ended, but that seems like what they did.

As for Obama, the 585B is accurate. The starting figure, again, I'm not sure about. It is notable that, under Obama, the deficit did spike to 1.4 trilion before going back down (he was saving the economy after all). It doesn't make the tweet wrong, but I think unflattering context is important even when you're arguing your point.

The truth is Republicans are not fiscal conservatives. They either spend more money than Democrats or refuse to collect enough taxes to prevent their deficits and, as a result, the national debt from skyrocketing.

Republicans ruin an economy, a Democrat is elected to recover it and then, because the Democrat added taxes to help recover the economy, the Republicans come in, claim the credit for how well the economy is doing, cut more taxes and **** it up again. It's been a trend for the last 30+ years and I don't see that slowing down any time soon haha.