Presidential election, 2016

[David Horn]

(11-27-2016, 09:17 PM)Warren Dew Wrote: The discussion was about the debt, not the deficit.

However, it's to be noted that the highest deficit on your chart was in 2009, Obama's first year, due to his patronage, er, "stimulus" spending, and it went down mostly after the partial shutdown that the Tea Party folks forced.

The big money drivers of the 2009 deficit:

1. Entitlements: UI, SNAP and other automatically triggered programs went into hyper-drive because they had a huge influx of newly entitled recipients.  If they hadn't been available, we would have had the GD all over again.
   
2. Tax Receipts: If income drops, taxes decline too, so this was not unexpected.
   
3. Bailouts: The initial round of bailouts was relatively large, and all on the Uncle Sam credit card.
   
4. Discretionary Stimulus:  Several programs were instigated, including Cash for Clunkers and some infrastructure projects.
   

It's hard to fault any of that.