From your chart #3. It's pretty clear that revenues and expenditures were tracking each other prior to Clinton. They went up and down together which left a chronic deficit. It was only the increased revenue of the Clinton years that brought the deficit down to zero and began paying off debt.
The charts clearly show that the Reagan years and Bush Jr. years were not just a time of great expenditure, but a time where the national debt grew dramatically. The country was living well above it's means to pay. Now, like any debtor with bankruptcy in the back of their mind, there is a realization that large amounts of revenue are going to pay for the interest on past credit purchases.
I blame Obama for new tax cuts, when all he had to do was nothing and the Bush Jr. tax cuts would have expired. By trying to please everyone he pleased nobody. This kept the total debt high.
Since then, the blur of Trump, Covid, and Biden are a result of a crisis when you realize that your emergency fund has already been spent. I am reminded of an acquaintance I talked to and I was explaining I wouldn't keep my emergency fund in real estate because it wasn't liquid enough for an emergency. He confided that his emergency fund was another credit card that had no balance.
I don't know details of the San Francisco housing crisis, but I did witness the Austin housing in detail. The primary inflation here was due to developers who rushed in to a growing market they didn't understand. They were desperate to hurry before interest rates rose and afraid the boom would end before they got their project sold. The result is a lot of churning when the projects did not fit, physically or in terms of who would buy or rent their finished product. Austin used to grow with infrastructure first, then projects. That wasn't fast enough for the new breed of developers. In the old neighborhoods, where people who lived in Austin for decades were found, there was an active encouragement of higher housing prices in the neighborhood, not because the residents liked higher property taxes, but because it made the redevelopment projects unaffordable unless they were well planned. |
