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Comment by kristianbrigman | Hacker News Reader

At least officially, the stated goal is to eliminate the deficit, which at least Elon has been warning about lately.

If that holds up (and who knows if it will) I wouldn’t expect any taxes to be cut until the budget is close to balanced.

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I expect a lot of noise about it, then an expansion of the deficit for tax cuts, followed by more noise about how evil the deficit is.

If we look historically since Nixon, Biden had the smallest deficit growth of 17%. Trump had 34%.

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

Republicans do not bring up deficit when they are in power.

Interesting… I had looked here: https://www.thebalancemoney.com/us-deficit-by-year-3306306

(quick google search, first result)

Which seems to show a different story. But looks like there is a lot of analysis on the numbers which can be done? (Eg I saw something in your article about ‘Biden will contribute 1.9T to the debt by 2031’.. even if he hadn’t gotten reelected, he wouldn’t be in office in 2031, so this includes the long-term effects of policies?)

On the contrary. Republicans universally "bring up" the deficit when in power. They only ever talk about it during Democratic administrations though.

Many republican candidates talked about deficit, including Trump. Then in power introduced budget cuts.

I wonder if I would be happier if I was as naive as a this.

Maybe, but it’s not like it hasn’t happened before… Clinton (yes, a democrat!) campaigned on balancing the budget, and iirc it actually was for a few years. In his case I don’t think taxes changed much either direction.

Oh I was talking specifically about tax cuts because of a more efficient government.

Budgets can be balanced, of course. In some contexts it may be harder to do.

Clinton made tax increase in 1993 with 39.3% top tax rate. It was a big part of the budget balancing that resulted in surplus.

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