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Comment by pu_pe | Hacker News Reader

Almost everything this administration does is inflationary. You cannot have tariffs, oil crisis, tax cuts, high debt spending without long-term investors getting worried that they won't meaningfully get their money back in 10 or 20 years from now.

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Trump is surrounded by people whom appear subservient under the sort of shallow gaze that Trump can muster if he tries hard enough, but in reality Trump is of course a tool, yes a pretty clumsy one who keeps trying to remind you who is the president here, but he is just following carrots dangled by very smart people with the means to keep Trump feeling the endorphins that Trump believes he is entitled to for winning in 2024.

And I gotta be honest, the carrot danglers don't seem to have a prosperous and thriving democracy in mind as one of their goals lol

There's a version of smart that they may be, but it's not a version of smart that is generally a parent of children they care about.

The future they're creating, no matter how much money they have and pass on, is going to be worse for their children and grandchildren. That's not smart, that's incredibly selfish and, regarding biological legacy, self-defeating.

* delusional.

One of the few english words, i have no native equivalent in practical use. Nobody sees themself as the vilain. We all have internal narratives, painting us as the heros of the story.

I feel like there is an unsolved problem in human organizations, that corrupts them over time from within, no matter if public or private institution. Trump is just a unique flashy clown that you may get with failing checks and balanced but im afraid, no matter the damage done, the delusional cogs with bloated selfesteem behind him are infinite as a selected breed, as a product/outcome of the institutions they emerged from.

How much of it is "the current administration" and how much is simply the continuation of a much longer trend? The US has been at war with this or that country in the Middle East for as long as I'm alive and I'm almost 40. Same with tax cuts, high spending and so on. It's easy to blame everything on Trump (or Reagan), but it seems to be a much broader issue with the whole system

Yes, this has been going on a long time. However, I think there is quite a bit of data about who is in charge or the White House and Congress when taxes go down/up or the deficit goes down/up, etc. It doesn't take more than one online search to see a very distinct pattern.

    Democrats          Change in Deficit
    ---------          -----------------
    Joe Biden              -6.1% GDP
    Barack Obama           -6.4% GDP
    Bill Clinton           -5.0% GDP
    Jimmy Carter           -0.2% GDP

    Republicans        Change in Deficit
    -----------        -----------------
    Donald Trump           +8.6% GDP
    George W. Bush        +11.0% GDP
    George H. W. Bush      +1.1% GDP
    Ronald Reagan          +0.2% GDP
    Gerald Ford            +2.3% GDP
    Richard Nixon          +0.7% GDP
    Dwight Eisenhower      -1.1% GDP

Thank you. Could you please point me to the source?

Source: https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/information-resources/budget/...

I found this under the same domain: https://www.whitehouse.gov/lab-leak-true-origins-of-covid-19..., weird.

Let's count our blessings that the ongoing campaign to fill whitehouse.gov with Republican partisan hackery doesn't extend to the boring accounting parts. Yet.

And yet every single Fox talking head says the opposite, resulting in half the country thinking it's Democrats responsible for the deficit. Propaganda is magic.

Thank you for this. I am so tired of false equivalence. Democrats passed Obamacare, the chips act, the infrastructure bill and countless other large impactful pieces of legislation that people take for granted. And did that while reducing the deficits. Republicans killed investment in solar energy ceding the industry to China, same with EVs. We would be better positioned with abundant electricity with AI needing vast amounts, but we’ve put them in charge yet again at a critical moment. Biden had a coherent policy that would have been predictable. Trump randomly banned fable but not gpt5.6 which caused most the world to decide that reliance on American AI is extremely risky…good job.

Clinton balanced the budget. There was a surplus. Go read Articles from the 90s there was fear that we would pay down the debt too fast and it would harm the economy.

Obama was on tracy to reduce the deficit and likely would have had the financial crisis not required stimulus.

Biden was using debt to invest in infrastructure and things like power generation that would yield returns unlike tax cuts that just exacerbate wealth concentration and inflation by asset appreciation due to capital chasing the same assets.

It’s not symmetrical one party is driving this and the irony is that they are the “fiscally responsible” party.

No amount of discipline is possible for democrats if every time they balance the budget republicans use the savings to cut taxes further.

Biden also had to respond to the deflationary risk of the Covid pandemic.

Printing hundreds of billions of dollars is also inflationary. Governments change but the impact of all this takes a very long time to flow through the economy.

Except American was in a structural slump similar to but not quite as bad as japans lost decade which meant that interest rates were stuck as near 0% percent. The inflation caused by Covid actually broke that cycle and American was on a much better path. Go look at articles from the last year of bidens term in the economist and financial times. The US had achieved a soft landing by bringing inflation down to within fed targets while avoiding a recession. We were the envy of the world. Income inequality was reducing, real wages were increasing for the first time in generations and productivity vs wages were converging.

Now we’re back to chaos and inflation and wage stagnation.

Yep. Biden handled this gracefully. And i can confirm internarional envy.

The part gggGP doesnt seem to grasp is, the fiscal hawks seeking to cut taxes and regulations etc. are strong and old lobbies around both parties and thats why you can see a trend. Some elected officials are just less susceptible than others and trump is a giant jackpot for the parasites, but so was reagan back in the days.

Most definitely. Trump just added a little bit of gunpowder to a fire that was already burning pretty self sustainably. Just a little turbo boost to get to the dark future a bit quicker.

If the fire wasn't already burning, Trump wouldn't have been able to bring such a number of cronies together - just look at the tech bros, they already had everything, but they still chose to lick the boot because they want moar!

foreign policy has always been a mess, and the US has always been a bully

but in terms of the deficit, the difference between Trump and other admins (Bush aside) is stark: just take a look at the table in one of the other comments (which I won't repeat here)

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