Why I'll always be a Democrat

If anyone wants to know why I'll always be a Dem -- despite my antipathy for all things woke and my disgust with Identity politics -- look here. 

Biden has proposed a budget which will help restore fiscal health by taxing the ultra-wealthy. If his plan is followed (which it won't be), the deficit will be reduced by a trillion bucks over the course of ten years. In fact:

The fading of the pandemic and the growth has enabled the deficit to fall from $3.1 trillion in fiscal 2020 to $2.8 trillion last year and a projected $1.4 trillion this year.

The Republicans got us into the deep red, and it is up to the Dems to fix things -- or at least to transform the Alizarin Crimson into a tolerable shade of pink. This shit has been going on for as long as I can recall, and I can recall longer than most of you. 

Reagan got into office, in large part, by decrying wasteful spending. He then ran up a deficit far larger than all previous deficits put together. The situation worsened under Bush the Elder. 

Clinton came in, cleaned up the mess, and actually ran up a surplus, something no other modern president has done. Moreover, he put together a plan that -- if followed over the course of multiple administrations -- not only would have eliminated our annual deficit but would have paid off all debt incurred throughout our history.

(About 14 percent of your tax bill goes to paying the interest on borrowed money. When Ralph Nader screwed Gore in 2000, he screwed you out of a whole lotta dough.)

Bush the Dumber tossed out Clinton's perfectly sensible plan. "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter," proclaimed Cheney. The deficit soared once more -- up, up and away.

After dealing with Dubya's Great Recession, Obama slowly but surely started bringing deficits back down to manageable levels. 

And then Trump did it again, spending like the proverbial drunken sailor and putting it all on the credit card. See here: "Donald Trump Built a National Debt So Big (Even Before the Pandemic) That It’ll Weigh Down the Economy for Years."

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.

No, it wasn't Covid that did it. Trump's spending spree began well before Covid.

The combination of Trump’s 2017 tax cut and the lack of any serious spending restraint helped both the deficit and the debt soar.

Trump insisted that his tax cuts for the wealthy would magically transform debt into income. In 2017, Trump told Sean Hannity:

“We have $21 trillion in debt. When this [the 2017 tax cut] really kicks in, we’ll start paying off that debt like it’s water.”

Nope. Didn't work out that way. Trump raised the national debt by a full third.

Despite this history, Trump's dimwitted followers damn the Democrats as the party of financial irresponsibility. Such is the power of propaganda over history, over lived reality. This situation is beyond infuriating. 

(It is a matter of debate as to whether high debt leads to inflation. Although post hoc ergo propter hoc is a fallacy, it is undeniable that inflation followed hard upon Trump's irresponsible spendthrift economics. Unfortunately, the main tool for combating inflation is raising the interest rate, which will slow the economy.)