The Treasury Dept has spoken and the answer is that the Bush and Trump Tax Cuts for the wealthy has added a total of $10 Trillion to the National Debt.
"After record U.S. government spending in 2020 and 2021" due to programs related to the economic fallout from the Covid-19 crisis, the Washington Post reports, "the deficit dropped from close to $3 trillion to close to $1 trillion in 2022. But rather than continue to fall to its pre-pandemic levels, the deficit unexpectedly jumped this year to roughly $2 trillion."
[...]
Bobby Kogan, senior director for federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress, has argued repeatedly that growing deficits in recent years have a clear and singular chief cause: Republican tax cuts that benefit mostly the wealthy and profitable corporations
In response to the Treasury figures released Friday, Kogan said that "roughly 75%" of the surge in the deficit and the debt ratio, the amount of federal debt relative to the overall size of the economy, was due to revenue decreases resulting from GOP-approved tax cuts over recent decades. "Of the remaining 25%," he said, "more than half" was higher interest payments on the debt related to Federal Reserve policy.
"We have a revenue problem, due to tax cuts," said Kogan, pointing to the major tax laws enacted under the administrations of George W. Bush and Donald Trump. "The Bush and Trump tax cuts broke our modern tax structure. Revenue is significantly lower and no longer grows much with the economy." And he offered this visualization about a growing debt ratio:
"The point I want to make again and again and again is that, relative to the last time CBO was projecting stable debt/GDP, spending is down, not up," Kogan said in a tweet Friday night. "It's lower revenue that's 100% responsible for the change in debt projections. If you take away nothing else, leave with this point."
[...]
In a detailed analysis produced in March, Kogan explained that, "If not for the Bush tax cuts and their extensions—as well as the Trump tax cuts—revenues would be on track to keep pace with spending indefinitely, and the debt ratio (debt as a percentage of the economy) would be declining. Instead, these tax cuts have added $10 trillion to the debt since their enactment and are responsible for 57 percent of the increase in the debt ratio since 2001, and more than 90 percent of the increase in the debt ratio if the one-time costs of bills responding to COVID-19 and the Great Recession are excluded."
I’ve said this time and time again. It’s about time we recognize the cold, hard truth. Republicans can’t run a budget.
Here it is in
black, white and burgundy. Every time a Democrat is in office the deficit goes down, every time a Republican is in office — the deficit goes up. This chart starts with a surplus under Clinton, then Bush puts in his tax cuts and
calamity ensues.
This is the central question in Washington, the budget. We've had over 30 years to see the answer to this question and it's conclusive. Bill Clinton increased taxes on the right slightly, but it was enough to reduce the deficit and balance the budget. We actually ran a surplus for 2 years until Bush came along and implanted a tax cut that made the deficit jump.
Eventually, his cuts wore off during Obama's term and with taxes back to Clinton levels the deficit was reduced by $900 Billion. That is until Republicans maneuvered Obama into a cutting a budget deal in 2015 that again included tax cuts. Immediately after that the deficit started going up again.
Trump implemented a giant tax cut in 2017 that blew another $Trillion dollar hole in the deficit, then he got hit with the pandemic and implemented another $2 trillion in stimulus spending so the deficit went up to over $3 trillion.
It came down by $380 Billion in Biden's first year because he also implemented a smaller stimulus with the American Rescue Plan but after that ended the deficit dropped by $1.7 Trillion - the 1-year greatest decrease in history.
But we still have Trump's tax cuts on the books, so just as it did with Trump the deficit is slowly climbing again. And they won't expire until 2027. We need to rescind them as soon as possible.
Republicans are terrible at the budget, the last Republican President to have a balanced budget was Eisenhower, and the top marginal tax rate back then was 90%. It doesn't need to go back to that, but it does need to be higher than it is now in order to lower the deficit back to surplus and finally start paying off the debt.
Gutting Social Security and Medicare - both of which stimulate the economy - is not the way to go. Don’t let them get away with the bogus excuse that the national debt is the result of “Democrat Spending” because that is simply — a lie.