It's official: Hillary vs. Trump

[Spider-Dan]

The (national) debt and the (budget) deficit are not the same thing.

In order to lower the total national debt, we must run budget surpluses (as opposed to budget deficits).  The last President to run a budget surplus was Hillary's husband; his Republican predecessor - with control of both houses of Congress - decided that a budget surplus necessarily means the people are being taxed too much and implemented enormous tax cuts that immediately destroyed the surplus.

Long story short: Dubya inherited a budget surplus and left his successor with a 1.5T budget deficit.
Obama inherited a 1.5T budget deficit and has cut that by two-thirds.

[CF DolFan]

I hate to remind you but W has been gone almost 8 years. No one is buying it any longer

[Tenshot13]

Okay, I read your post wrong, but at this point, I have to agree with CF.

[Spider-Dan]

Why am I mentioning George W. Bush 8 years after he left office?  Great question.  I propose a thought experiment: if the GOP gets control of Congress and the White House, what will be their tax policy?

According to PolitiFact, here is the 10-year impact on federal revenue from each of these candidates' proposed tax policy:

Hillary: increases by $500B~$1.1T
Trump: reduces by $10T

And just for comparison's sake, so we get a better idea of the "sense of the parties" on this matter (and not just these two individuals):

Bernie: increases by $10T~$15T
Cruz: reduces by $3.6T~$13.9T

So the point that I am making is not one that is specific to Dubya, but to Republicans as a party: arguing over debts and deficits is a complete waste of time, because it's a smokescreen.  Republicans had control of the White House and Congress with budget surpluses in hand, and they immediately passed massive tax cuts to get us back to deficit status.  And they will gladly tell you right now that if they get control, they will do exactly the same thing again.

As Dick Cheney put it, "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter."

[Tenshot13]

You lost me at politifacts...not a secrete that it's biased.

[pondwater]

Long story short: Dubya inherited a budget surplus and left his successor with a 1.5T budget deficit.
Obama inherited a 1.5T budget deficit and has cut that by two-thirds.

Ahhh, the Clinton surplus myth. He raided the SS fund.

"If the public debt during those years was bought with other debt -- meaning by the Social Security trust and the Federal Reserve -- we didn't actually pay down any debt, did we? If you take out an equity line of credit on your home to pay off your car loan, your debt didn't decrease. Furthermore, if you take out an equity line of credit to pay off your car loan and buy a boat, it would be deceitful on your part to say you reduced your debt, right?"

[Spider-Dan]

You lost me at politifacts...not a secrete that it's biased.

Facts have a well-known liberal bias.

Ahhh, the Clinton surplus myth. He raided the SS fund.

[citation needed]

[pondwater]

[citation needed]

Go google it, I don't have time to argue about shit that you damn well know is true.

[Fau Teixeira]

I heard the reason Trump won't release his tax returns is because he donated to NAMBLA.

"Maybe that’s right, maybe that’s wrong, but I don’t know why he doesn’t release his records."

[MyGodWearsAHoodie]

I heard the reason Trump won't release his tax returns is because he donated to NAMBLA.

"Maybe that’s right, maybe that’s wrong, but I don’t know why he doesn’t release his records."

People are telling me the reason why Trump hasn't released his tax refunds is that he has donated to NAMBLA.  I don't know. Maybe he did, maybe he didn't.  I don't think Crooked Trump would do something like that.  I would like to think Crooked Trump wouldn't do something like that.  But lots of people are talking.  You tell me is the reason he hasn't released his tax refunds because he donated to NAMBLA.

[Spider-Dan]

Go google it, I don't have time to argue about shit that you damn well know is true.

It's kind of a waste of time for me to fact check your easily disproven claims when you will categorically dismiss any non-partisan source I cite, but let's try anyway:

"Clinton’s large budget surpluses also owe much to the Social Security tax on payrolls. Social Security taxes now bring in more than the cost of current benefits, and the "Social Security surplus" makes the total deficit or surplus figures look better than they would if Social Security wasn’t counted. But even if we remove Social Security from the equation, there was a surplus of $1.9 billion in fiscal 1999 and $86.4 billion in fiscal 2000. So any way you count it, the federal budget was balanced and the deficit was erased, if only for a while."

The reality-based community strikes again!

[pondwater]

It's kind of a waste of time for me to fact check your easily disproven claims when you will categorically dismiss any non-partisan source I cite, but let's try anyway:

"Clinton’s large budget surpluses also owe much to the Social Security tax on payrolls. Social Security taxes now bring in more than the cost of current benefits, and the "Social Security surplus" makes the total deficit or surplus figures look better than they would if Social Security wasn’t counted. But even if we remove Social Security from the equation, there was a surplus of $1.9 billion in fiscal 1999 and $86.4 billion in fiscal 2000. So any way you count it, the federal budget was balanced and the deficit was erased, if only for a while."

The reality-based community strikes again!

"The government can have a surplus even if it has trillions in debt, but it cannot have a surplus if that debt increased every year." And the debt increased every year under Clinton!

[Spider-Dan]

I figured it would be totally pointless to ask you to provide any sort of evidence for the claims you keep firing off - first it's the "SS fund," now after that's been quickly shot down, it's time to throw something else against the wall and see what sticks - so I decided to look into the underlying rationale behind your argument.

It turns out that this is more "unemployment rate" conservative logic.  By that, I mean: we have used the Bureau of Labor Statistics U3 Unemployment Rate as the official measurement of the "unemployment rate" since the '40s.  We used it for the Reagan administration.  We used it for the Clinton administration.  We used it for the Bush administration.  Yet suddenly, when that rate starts decreasing rapidly under Obama, conservatives immediately insist that the U3 rate is misleading and inaccurate, and we shouldn't be using it at all.  (But they were fine with hammering Obama with it when the number was terrible!)

So let's talk about deficits and surpluses.  The (unattributed...) quote you provided above is from a website that has taken great pains to explain why we should not consider the Clinton surplus a real surplus (namely: because the gov't used surplus money to buy bonds from itself, which immediately converts all that surplus into debt).

The rather obvious and simple hole in this logic is that using the same math that we have been using to evaluate EVERY OTHER budget for decades, Clinton ran a surplus.  The numbers come from the Congressional Budget Office!  So yet again, conservatives are trying to change the definition of terms when they don't like the outcome.

[pondwater]

I figured it would be totally pointless to ask you to provide any sort of evidence for the claims you keep firing off - first it's the "SS fund," now after that's been quickly shot down, it's time to throw something else against the wall and see what sticks - so I decided to look into the underlying rationale behind your argument.

It turns out that this is more "unemployment rate" conservative logic.  By that, I mean: we have used the Bureau of Labor Statistics U3 Unemployment Rate as the official measurement of the "unemployment rate" since the '40s.  We used it for the Reagan administration.  We used it for the Clinton administration.  We used it for the Bush administration.  Yet suddenly, when that rate starts decreasing rapidly under Obama, conservatives immediately insist that the U3 rate is misleading and inaccurate, and we shouldn't be using it at all.  (But they were fine with hammering Obama with it when the number was terrible!)

So let's talk about deficits and surpluses.  The (unattributed...) quote you provided above is from a website that has taken great pains to explain why we should not consider the Clinton surplus a real surplus (namely: because the gov't used surplus money to buy bonds from itself, which immediately converts all that surplus into debt).

The rather obvious and simple hole in this logic is that using the same math that we have been using to evaluate EVERY OTHER budget for decades, Clinton ran a surplus.  The numbers come from the Congressional Budget Office!  So yet again, conservatives are trying to change the definition of terms when they don't like the outcome.

It doesn't matter what kind of fuzzy math or cooking the books you use. If your total debt is going up, you don't have a surplus. If Spider doubles his income next year, but conversely doubles his debt. He most certainly hasn't run a surplus.

[Spider-Dan]

Even if we abandon the math the CBO has used to calculate every other President's budget and torture the numbers to show that Clinton technically had a deficit instead of a surplus... you realize that the same math would still show Dubya increasing that deficit by several hundred billion dollars the next year, right?

That's the point.  If you really care about the national debt and budget deficits, then you should never vote Republicans into federal office, because their first move will be to pass deficit-exploding tax cuts.