There were times in Barack Obama’s presidency where he would brag about having had lowered the deficit — which were hilarious examples of how to lie with statistics. “We’ve done all this while cutting our deficits by almost three-quarters,” Obama told us in his 2016 State of the Union address, after citing a whole bunch of other economic statistics.
How could Obama, who nearly doubled the national debt to just south of $20 trillion, claim to have reduced the deficit? Simple — run an explosive deficit in the trillions during your first year in office, spend less in later years, then claim that as a decline.
The largest deficit that George W. Bush ran was a $454.8 billion deficit during his last year in office. Obama ran his largest deficit his first year in office, which amounted to $1.415 trillion. Obama reducing the deficit to $552 billion in 2016 is what he meant by “cutting our deficits by almost three-quarters.”
Put another way, Obama’s smallest deficit during his presidency was still larger than Bush’s biggest.
Fortunately, under President Donald Trump, we’ll actually see deficit reduction, and not just a “reduction” from the largest single-year deficit in American history.
When President Trump took office January 20th the total national debt was $19,947,304,555,212, or nearly $20 trillion. While there are fluctuating cycles of increase and decrease the debt reached a high of $19,959,593,604,841 on February 28, 2017, stalled, and since March 14th 2017 continually dropped:
Total U.S. National Debt has now decreased by over $100 billion. *Note: That’s five times more than is needed to build the Southern Security and Border Wall.
And yes, this decrease is real and represents a long term reversal. During same 6 months in 2016 the U.S. National Debt grew by $450 billion (from $18,941,406,899,252.15 -to- $19,391,704,027,667.12). [DATA HERE] The Trump trend is not connected to a temporary lowering of debt during tax collection season. The ACTUAL ‘federal’ debt clock is now running backwards.
So far, so good. While there have been no major legislative achievements during the Trump presidency thus far, there has been a massive reduction in the nation’s regulatory burden, spurring business activity (and thus enlarging the tax base).
Trump’s 2018 budget plan would cut spending by $4.6 trillion over 10 years, representing a nine percent net reduction in the size of government spending over that period.
What do you think about this enormous deficit reduction? Is President Trump keeping his word to the American people. Let us know your thoughts below and share this story on Facebook and Twitter!
