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Politics : The Trump Presidency
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To: zzpat who wrote (65127)4/6/2018 3:49:50 PM
From: TimF  Read Replies (1) of 360581
 
Everyone in the country was in agreement that Clinton set in place a process that would result in all of our debt being paid back.

Again both false and irrelevant.

False in that its literally not true, and in fact isn't even close to true. Many people at the time had no belief that the debt would all be paid back or even that a large portion of it would. Also because if your count debt to the SSA federal debt was still increasing. Also the great attention to trying to control non-military, non-entitlement spending shown by the newly Republican elected congress we obviously not going to continue (and in fact did not either from Republicans or Democrats going forward)

Irrelevant because whatever people believed at the time with hindsite we can see such an idea was clearly false. The tech boom wasn't' something that was going to continue forever, neither was the ability to continue to slash the size of the US military (if the rate the size was cut continued it wouldn't take a huge amount of time to bring the military down to zero, and it can't go negative, so the shrinkage had a hard theoretical limit and a much higher practical limit).

Getting back to the point about intergovernmental debt increasing, it was well known even then that the trust funds would get to a point where they could no longer loan money to the treasury and would have to be paid back. So even if spending had been contained somewhat and the tax cuts had never occurred, the debt to the public would have increased.

As for sanity, the closest thing to "insane" in this conversation, is to put so much attention on smaller factors like tax cuts, and completely ignore the elephant in the room, entitlements. Its like saying the surface on the Earth is dry because your currently not under water while ignoring the oceans.
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