Sad part is that, you can basically pick any random date over the past 50 years and this headline would ring true at that time. Our debt always seems to be at an all time high.
Then George W. Bush enacted a big tax cut in 2001 that no one remembers because it was heavily weighted toward the top 1%. Suddenly we didn’t have a surplus problem anymore.
Bush tax cuts did add to the deficit though.
https://www.investopedia.com/us-national-debt-by-year-749929...
Here they show the debt increasing through the 90s but by less than most other decades. I don't know if it takes into account inflation though so maybe that would have made the debt have less value. Seems like they didn't use any of the surplus to pay off the debt.
Actually now that it's set out like that, the strategists were just as much in la-la land as Bush was.
He knew exactly what he was doing.
They didn't even pretend to reduce the entitlement programs that they claim to hate, but are fiercely defended by the elderly, who overwhelmingly vote for them.
To be fair, I’m not saying our debt is in a good place. But just that we should expect it to always be the most it’s ever been, just like we’d always expect the economy to be the largest it’s ever been.
By itself, it doesn’t mean anything if it’s always increasing, what matters more is how quickly debt is growing and if we aren’t keeping up in how we pay it off
You don’t need to fund growth with debt necessarily- look at Norway for example. They have modest gdp growth and a net asset position. (And yes I know it’s because of their mineral wealth I’m just saying that growth doesn’t necessarily entail growing debt).