Cato institute thinks otherwise.
And before you say it:
Media bias fact check says this:
Bias Rating:
RIGHT-CENTER (4.7)
Factual Reporting:
HIGH (1.8)
Country:
USA
MBFC’s Country Freedom Rank:
MOSTLY FREE
Media Type:
Organization/Foundation
Traffic/Popularity:
Medium Traffic
MBFC Credibility Rating:
HIGH CREDIBILITY
They seem to think it was George H W Bush and the republican congress who's policies are what lead to the Clinton surplus.
Thoughts?
I suppose it all depends interpretation.
Clinton still gets credit for a balanced budget even though it has become fashionable for students of revisionist history to try to point to the slight increase in national debt during his tenure to try to deny this even though a slight increase in national debt is in no way a reliable measurement.
We see a lot of this whitewashing of factual history in the way we describe past administrations.
Like Ronald Reagan getting credit for the fall of The Soviet Union when all he really had to do with any of it was being in the right place at the right time.
Or like giving Reagan some saint like credit for his economic prowess when in reality what he really did was begin the damage to our economy that we are still living with now.
Also like Donald Trump's first term. People try to whitewash those years as some kind of "golden age" for the U.S. economy but in truth the only people who actually did well in that economy were Wall Street investors and billionaires.
The vast majority of American citizens and small businesses were on the rocks and in need of government handouts within two months of the economy shutting down for the Covid-19 pandemic. Why?
Because they weren't REALLY doing all that "well" to begin with.
It was all just smoke and mirrors. Rhetoric. Propaganda.
That's why it's so interesting to see Trump in his second term paying all this lip service about DOGE and the need to "slash the national deficit." He's responsible for the largest increase in national debt of any president in modern history. But we've somehow whitewashed that too.
We don't talk about it.
So give Bill Clinton his due credit. He ran a very successful administration for two terms. Yes, he left Bush with a stable, mostly balanced budget, and he didn't do the long term damage to our national debt that four years of Donald Trump left us.
One of President Donald Trump’s lesser known but profoundly damaging legacies will be the explosive rise in the national debt that occurred on his watch. The financial burden that he’s inflicted on our government will wreak havoc for decades, saddling our kids and grandkids with debt.
The national debt has risen by almost $7.8 trillion during Trump’s time in office. That’s nearly twice as much as what Americans owe on student loans, car loans, credit cards and every other type of debt other than mortgages, combined, according to
data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. It amounts to about $23,500 in new federal debt for every person in the country.
The growth in the annual deficit under Trump ranks as the third-biggest increase, relative to the size of the economy, of any U.S. presidential administration, according to a calculation by a leading Washington budget maven, Eugene Steuerle, co-founder of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. And unlike George W. Bush and Abraham Lincoln, who oversaw the larger relative increases in deficits, Trump did not launch two foreign conflicts or have to pay for a civil war.
The “King of Debt” promised to reduce the national debt — then his tax cuts made it surge. Add in the pandemic, and he oversaw the third-biggest deficit increase of any president.
www.propublica.org
