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Comment by jameslk | Hacker News Reader

> The (vast?) majority of the debt happened as the result of the Republican party both increasing spending and cutting taxes every time it lands someone in the White House and before midterms flip the House back to Democrats.

Both parties have run an increasing deficit, with the only outlier being a small amount of time in the late 90s. The deficit is largely caused by social security outlays, medicare/medicaid outlays, and military spending, none of which are going to meaningfully change under either party

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Under Bill Clinton, in 2000 we ran a (small) surplus, but even then, the shock of running a surplus hid the fact that the debt increased during his term overall. That was the last president in which there was even one year of the debt decreasing, all other presidents increased the debt. Here is data:

https://www.macrotrends.net/2496/national-debt-growth-by-yea...

Maybe you mean something different, but not every recent president has "run an increasing deficit" Reagan: +74B Bush: +103B Clinton: -382B Bush: +1.5T Obama: -747B Trump: +2.1T Biden: -1T

Where change in deficit is the final budget deficit - starting budget deficit

So, every Republican president runs an increasing deficit and every Democrat president runs a decreasing deficit.

Congress is the one that largely makes the fiscal policy choices. For example, during Clinton’s second term when the deficit was almost eliminated (some claim there was a surplus, but there wasn’t because of social security liabilities), you had a republican controlled congress who were pushing for cuts and fiscal tightening:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract_with_America

The republican program was in large part vetoed by Clinton though and the spending cuts that passed were largely offset by the tax cuts. From what I read the reduction in deficit is mostly due to the dot-com boom, helped with the "deficit reduction act" of 1993 that was pushed by Clinton and happened to hike taxes at the right time to tax the boom.

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