In his Dec. 30 letter (“Arguments are just pounding the table”), Mark Carter asserts that during Barack Obama’s presidency, the federal deficit increased from $10 trillion to $20 trillion. He confuses the deficit with the national debt, which did increase from $10 trillion to approximately $20 trillion from the end of fiscal 2008 (Sept. 30, 2008) to the end of fiscal 2016. Early in the Obama presidency, the country was recovering from former President George W. Bush’s recession, which required greater federal outlays. The deficit exceeded $1 trillion from fiscal 2009 to 2012, decreased until it was less than $500,000 billion in 2014 and 2015, then increased relatively slowly.
Carter claims former President Donald Trump’s tax cuts were net-revenue-positive. This is false. The cuts were passed in December 2017. The federal debt at the end of fiscal 2017 was $20 trillion. The numbers for 2018 and 2019 were $21.5 trillion and $22.7 trillion, so the tax cuts clearly did not pay for themselves. Republican presidents from Ronald Reagan to Trump have claimed their tax cuts would pay for themselves, but they never have.
The national debt reached $27 trillion by the end of fiscal 2020, an increase of $5 trillion in a single year, largely, but not entirely, due to COVID-19. Carter asserts no president could do a better job than Trump of handling the pandemic fiscally. Has he forgotten Trump’s early failures of leadership: proclaiming the pandemic a hoax, promising it would be over by Easter 2020, leaving the states to bid against one another for protective equipment, failure to mask and ridiculing those who do? All these things cost lives and money.
The fiscal 2021 debt was $28.4 trillion. This relatively small year-on-year increase is hardly proof of profligacy by either political party.
David McKenzie
Bennington