National debt crosses a historic threshold, exposing absurdity of Trump campaign promises

Throughout Barack Obama’s presidency, congressional Republicans warned that the nation was facing a devastating debt crisis, which would bankrupt the United States and devastate the nation’s fiscal standing for generations. GOP officials warned that without dramatic action, the enormous national debt would reach the same size as the overall U.S. economy — a threshold that would spell immediate doom.

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Roughly a decade later, take a wild guess what threshold we just crossed. The Wall Street Journal reported:

The U.S. national debt now exceeds 100% of gross domestic product, crossing a once-unthinkable threshold, on the way toward breaking the record set in the wake of World War II. […]

By itself, the milestone doesn’t mean much. There isn’t a special level where debt goes from problematic to catastrophic. And the ratio might bounce around in coming quarters as tax receipts come in, tariff refunds go out and GDP fluctuates in response to inflation and revisions. Still, the triple-digit mark is a potent symbol of the fiscal stresses on the U.S. that have been building for decades.

At this point, we could talk about the historical pattern over the last several decades, in which budget deficits have grown by massive amounts under ever Republican administration (Reagan, Bush 1, Bush 2 and Trump), while shrinking under every Democratic administration (Clinton, Obama and Biden), even while the political conventional wisdom suggested that the GOP was the party of “fiscal responsibility.”

We could also talk about the fact that the Journal’s report went largely ignored by Republicans, including the Obama-era voices who warned that the sky was falling, and contemporary GOP voices who no longer feel the need to pretend that the party cares about deficit reduction.

While we’re at it, we could also spend some time talking about the fact that deficit reduction is no longer a Republican priority at all

— it was, for example, entirely ignored in the latest White House budget proposal — as GOP policymakers focus instead on massive tax breaks (which make the debt worse) and massive increases in defense spending (which also make the debt worse).

But there’s another dimension to the larger story that often goes overlooked: Trump’s campaign promises.

In February 2016, the then-candidate appeared on Fox News and assured viewers that, if he were president, he could start paying off the national debt “so easily.” The Republican argued at the time that it would simply be a matter of looking at the country as “a profit-making corporation” instead of “a losing corporation.”

A month later, Trump declared at a debate that he could cut trillions of dollars in spending by eliminating “waste, fraud and abuse.” Asked for a specific example, he said, “We’re cutting Common Core.” (Common Core is an education curriculum, which costs the federal government effectively nothing.)

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Steve Benen

Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”

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• National debt crosses a historic threshold, exposing absurdity of Trump campaign promises