Big spenders, left and right

The United States of America reached a milestone last week that didn’t get the attention it deserves. Our national debt exceeded $40 trillion for the first time.

That deficit far outstripped our Gross Domestic Product of $32 trillion last year. GDP is the total value of our nation’s goods and services for the year.

All the more remarkable is that it happened during a Republican Presidency and Congress. The Democrats have long been tabbed as the party of big spending, but facts say otherwise.

Since 1975, the era of growing deficits, Republicans have accounted for $19.92 trillion of the national debt while Democrats have overspent by $19.48 trillion.

So both parties share the blame.

Deficits were negligible until the presidency of Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s. His economy was wrecked by the Arab oil embargo as the USA ran up what was then a humongous $374 billion deficit. That seems like pocket change today.

Until Carter, budget surpluses were common. But they have virtually disappeared since then. Democrat Bill Clinton was the last president who recorded a surplus, for four straight years from 1998-2001.

Republicans George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush ran deficits of $1.55 trillion, $1.86 trillion, and $4.9 trillion, respectively.

Democrat Barack Obama, who came into office with the economy in freefall from the 2008 Wall Street financial disaster, ran up a deficit of $9.32 trillion over two terms trying to prevent another great depression. He succeeded, but at great cost.

Republican Donald Trump ran up a $7.8 trillion deficit during his first term because of tax cuts, wild spending and covid, and is in the hole nearly $4 trillion halfway through his second term.

In between, Democrat Joe Biden recorded an $8.47 trillion deficit, largely due to rescuing the nation from the pandemic.

To date, Trump is responsible for 30% of the total national debt, followed by Obama at 23%, Biden 21% and George W. Bush 12%. Two Republicans and two Democrats.

WE’LL HAVE TO SPEND more than $2 trillion in the coming year just to pay the interest on that $40 trillion debt. That interest payment is as much as we spend on national defense and Social Security combined.

So we have enough money to pay interest to Wall Street and Chinese and Arab investors who buy our debt, but our big-spending politicians in a Republican-controlled Congress say we’ll have to cut healthcare, Social Security and education to pay for their profligate spending.

We also apparently have enough money to resurrect outdated battleships. Trump wants to increase the already bloated Defense budget by 60%, to $1.5 trillion next year. Included in that are plans for a new “Trump” class of battleships — at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars — even though the Navy doesn’t want them and hasn’t built a new one since World War II. The last of our battleships was decommissioned after Vietnam because the big old warships aren’t effective in modern warfare.

It’s likely that our nation’s deficit in Trump’s second term will mushroom beyond $8 trillion, fed by the war in Iraq, trade wars with Canada and other allies, skyrocketing fuel prices, payments to farmers to cover trade losses, tariffs paid by American consumers, inflation brought on by a faltering economy, vanity construction projects in our nation’s capital, and other foolish spending.

Trump’s record-setting deficits will cement this vainglorious President as #1 in at least one category.

Not bad for a guy who went bankrupt six times.