Swampy
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https://reason.com/2020/08/27/no-donald-trump-did-not-shrink-government/
Early in Wednesday night's Republican National Convention broadcast, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem reeled off a list of reasons she thinks voters should reward President Donald Trump with a second term. Among them: "He shrunk government."
Alas, that statement isn't close to being true.
The most traditional way to measure the size of government is to count how much money it spends. In Barack Obama's last full fiscal year of 2016 (covering, as fiscal years do, the period from October 1 the previous year to September 30 of the annum in question), the federal government spent $3.85 trillion—$2.43 trillion on "mandatory" items (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc.), $1.16 trillion on discretionary outlays (more than half of which went to the Pentagon), and $230 billion on debt service. (I'm using here numbers compiled by The Balance, which differ slightly from those of the Congressional Budget Office but are broken out in more detail.)
In fiscal year 2020, before the coronavirus pandemic triggered a record amount of spending, the federal government was on course to cough up $4.79 trillion—$2.98 trillion mandatory, $1.44 trillion discretionary, and $380 billion in interest.
So under Trump's signature, before any true crisis hit, the annual price tag of government went up by $937 billion in less than four years—more than the $870 billion price hike Obama produced in an eight-year span that included a massive federal response to a financial meltdown.
Ah, comes the inevitable rejoinder, but it's Congress that has the power of the purse! Quite so. And that Congress was controlled by the president's political party for 54 percent of his tenure, during which time Republicans jointly agreed through a series of continuing resolutions and must-pass, little-read "omnibus" packages to lift Obama-era spending caps, wave away the debt ceiling limit on federal borrowing, and fulfill Trump's campaign pledge to "save," rather than reform, old-age entitlement programs.
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Kinda forgot to mention the automatic increases built into funding, like the inflation clause in Social Security.
Kinda forgot to mention the automatic increases built into funding, like the inflation clause in Social Security.
You'd have to do similar adjustments to compare Obama's figures as well though.
In terms of concrete things that Obama did to affect the debt balance:
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The bailout
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Extending Bush tax cuts
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Increase in military spending
Each added on the order of about $800B over his term.
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