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Comment by ericmcer | Hacker News Reader

I legitimately cant tell who you are referring too, politics is so muddled now that both sides believe wholeheartedly that their side is the one with the correct plan to fix the economy.

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I wrote it that way intentionally. The data are available, so it's easy enough to find out "who was president during the last budget surplus" and "who presided over the largest increase in the federal debt." Some people will be surprised by the answers and will see the data as partisan.

I'm not linking to sources because people feel the need to find the sources or they don't believe them. But there are a number of graphs of the numbers available on the Internet.

Suffice it to say that any adviser advising a presidential candidate to pay any attention to the deficit beyond lip service is doing that candidate a disservice, as voters have shown time and again that they simply do not care.

I think I first heard Biden say, "don't tell me what you believe, show me your budget and I'll tell you what you believe". He perhaps got it from Ted Kennedy who I doubt was the first person to say it, but I've just found it to be one of the simplest ways to cut through BS. Talk is cheap; doing the work is not. And as you say, when you look at the US budget deficit through the last half century, it's quite clear that the party that claims the mantle of fiscal responsibility it not on the level.

Congress does the budget. The President just signs it (or not).

Congress does all legislation. Saying the President "just" signs legislation handily relieves the President of responsibility for any laws they sign during their tenure.

But Presidents typically take credit for their legislative wins, so we also give them credit for budgets they sign.

(It is also the case that one measure of the efficacy of an administration is the quality of the budgets they are able to coax out of Congress.)

Eh, the majority party in controls the budget negotiations, and the president is either the leader of that party or of the minority party. Either way there is considerably more involvement than just signing the result of other people’s work.

And contextually, the change in the deficit still aligns with the Party of the President (and party of the senate majority)

Reagan had to make a lot of concessions to the Democrat majority in Congress to get the budget passed. It wasn't much of the budget he wanted.

That's like crediting a football team's chapionship win 100% to the players and 0% to the coach. It's true in the most literal sense, yet widely missing the mark.

According to Investopedia [1], US debt rose most under administrations of FDR, Woodrow Wilson, and Ronald Reagan. This is pretty easy to explain by their terms coinciding with winning in WWII, WWI, and the Cold War respectively.

The last president to attain a budget surplus was indeed a surprise for me.

[1]: https://www.investopedia.com/us-debt-by-president-dollar-and...

There was a surplus in the last year of the Clinton presidency, so I presume he's referring to George W Bush. There was also the whole 9/11 and War on Terror thing in the first year of his presidency though, so it's hardly a fair comparison. Gore would have blown his budget if he'd won too.

Largely speaking democrat administrations reduce the deficit while republican administrations increase the deficit, despite this being the polar opposite of political talking points.

Data for anyone looking: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFSD

> the whole 9/11 and War on Terror

I remember the budget hawks in the aughts saying that if the administration wanted to spend a ton of money on wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (this: unrelated to 9/11), that it would be fiscally prudent to raise tax revenue to cover the costs. Bush instead cut tax revenue substantially.

I'm not making a judgement either way, just saying that there was a choice here and Bush made the choice to increase the deficit. (Dick Cheney was correct when he advised Bush that deficits don't matter. The increase in the deficit indeed didn't matter to the electorate, and the deficit spending, in part via tax cuts, did win him a second term.)

Gore might have blown his budget by investing in Solar instead..

Both Gore and Clinton were actual budget hawks. A big part of his campaign was highlighting the fact that the last few years had been budget surpluses, and talking about paying off the debt entirely.

We all know he would have been better than Bush, the bar is low, but you don't have to make it look like we missed out on the least shitty president in all of US history.

> I legitimately cant tell who you are referring too

How old are you? If you're a Gen-Xer you should remember Clinton's surpluses if you followed the news:

* https://www.brookings.edu/articles/a-surplus-if-we-can-keep-...

Then Bush got in (beating Gore by ~600 votes in Florida to take the Electoral College), and then did tax cuts and later war spending:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_tax_cuts

* https://www.cbpp.org/research/the-legacy-of-the-2001-and-200...

More recently, when the GOP controlled Congress and White House (Trump), they did a bunch of tax cuts:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_Cuts_and_Jobs_Act

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