Getting back to the OP (since we are veering far off thread), I don’t think the true Tea Partiers are okay with Trump raising the deficit. And if they still support Trump over a (D), it would be like Planned Parenthood endorsing a pro-life Democrat over a pro-life Republican. Not ideal, but you take what you can get.
As I pointed out, though, if deficits are what matter to them then it’s completely illogical for them to support Trump over a Democrat, because Democrats have a far better track record in recent years on reducing deficits than Republicans do (and Trump is one of the most deficit-expanding Republicans we’ve ever seen).
In fact, it turns out that Tea Party support for Trump has increased since he got going on his deficit-boosting shenanigans:
My take on the Tea Party’s attitude towards Trump and deficits is different from yours. ISTM that a significant chunk of the Tea Party was never really so much about fiscal policy as about trying to find a “respectable” platform onto which to displace concerns they weren’t comfortable confronting or admitting to: primarily racial resentment caused by US demographic shifts and Obama’s election, and anxieties about loss of economic security and social status that they can’t bring themselves to admit are largely the result of policies championed by wealthy conservatives.
Trump’s incoherent and nasty expressions of aggrieved entitlement, swaggering bigotry, and dismissive sneers aren’t actually fixing any of these Tea Partiers’ genuine problems, but he echoes a lot of the things they’re thinking and makes them feel listened to and validated. They don’t really care what he’s doing to the deficit because for them, it was never really about the deficit in the first place.
Tea Partiers want a very specific form of deficit-reduction: they want spending cuts. If a president raises taxes drastically, that would reduce the deficit, but that’s not the kind they want.
Tea Partiers, like almost everyone, are practical when they have to be. If Trump gives them 70% of what they want, they know they’ll have to be content with not getting the other 30%.
Many Democrats were less than thrilled with Obama’s big defense budgets, drone strikes, and some other things in 2012, but they sure weren’t going to vote for Mitt Romney.
Look you guys are having some real problems with this so I’m going to give you one more chart. Please cross reference the chart with the one I provided that shows taxes as a percentage of GDP remaining the same for 70 years. This is the chart that shows spending as a percentage of GDP. There is a clear trend. If you choose not to see it, that is another thing.
That’s all I’m going to say on the topic because I’m going to get dinged if I keep trying to explain this concept to y’all. Good luck.
Good post. It never was about debt/deficits. That much is now clearly obvious.
That chart doesn’t support your talking point about there being a “drastic” increase in spending. The only noticeable blip since WW2 is during the Great Recession, when it’s of course expected, and occurred at the same time that taxes plummeted to around 14% of GDP.
So, your view that our debt has been driven only by spending is not supported by the data at all. Spending has gone up some, and taxes have gone down some.
I think a lot of people in the country are angry, but don’t really know what they’re angry about. Their world isn’t perfect and it must be someone’s fault. They’ve found groups, and news sources, and a political party that tell them their anger is justified and it’s all the fault of <insert scapegoat here>. But don’t worry, vote for <insert pandering politician here> and everything will be just fine.
In four years, when everything isn’t just fine, they get a little bit angrier. The last scapegoat and pandering politician are conveniently forgotten, and the search begins for new ones. Lather, rinse, repeat.
In a sense, the Tea Party were angry about deficits. But all their anger and tax cutting didn’t make their world perfect, so it’s time to be angry about something else.
We all know what great decisions people make when they’re angry, right?
As more people retire, more people are going to draw Medicare and Social Security benefits that they were guaranteed. Since there were fewer retirees in the past than today, and will be more in the future, spending on entitlements will go up for another couple decades, then head down again.
This has nothing to do with ideology, parties, or elections. Anyone who has paid attention to fiscal policy at any point in the last 50 years knew this would happen.
From what I recall of the Tea Party’s origins early in the Obama era, what they were most upset about was the idea that “their” tax dollars would be going to bail out underwater homeowners and failed businesses – from their neighbor who refinanced a mortgage for kitchen remodeling up to and including AIG, Chase and Goldman Sachs. It was a classic cry of “I did everything right – why should I have to help someone who did everything wrong?”
They never cared about the deficit. They had no sense of macro-economics at all. They just wanted to scapegoat those other people “who did everything wrong.”
So of course they support the guy who tells them exactly who those people are. Deficits? Who gives a shit?
But under Trump they’re not getting spending cuts as “a form of deficit-reduction”: they’re getting spending cuts (generally targeted to “liberal” forms of expenditure such as social safety nets and environmental protection) accompanied by deficit increases.
This further reinforces the hypothesis that Tea Partiers really don’t care about deficits qua deficits: what they want is a respectable-sounding reason to inflict spending cuts on people and aims they don’t like.
Yup.
AWESOME! Since 1962, the furthest back the White House offers information, the average Republican President increases discretionary spending over 25% faster than the average Democratic President. In fact, due to the compromise between Obama and Congress in 2011, discretionary spending ended up falling almost 1% per year.
By President, average annual increase/decrease, in 2012 dollars:
Kennedy: 1.22% increase
Johnson: 4.98% increase
Nixon: 3.64% decrease
Ford: 3.4% increase
Carter: 3.51% increase
Reagan: 1.52% increase
Bush: 0.09% decrease
Clinton: 0.55% decrease
Bush 2.0: 3.85% increase
Obama: 0.96% decrease
Trump: currently 1.05% increase
Three caveats, none resulting in partisan differences:
[ol]
[li]Due to Kennedy’s assasination in November of 1963, I cannot find who signed the 1964 budget. It has been attributed to Kennedy;[/li][li]Due to Nixon’s resignation in August on 1974, I cannot find who signed the 1974 budget. It has been attributed to Nixon;[/li][li]The transition quarter of 1976 created an added "mini-budget’ that screwed with my spreadsheet. As it occurs entirely during Ford’s administration and hardly moves the needle in total effect, it has been discarded.[/li][/ol]
In the last 35 years, if you want discretionary spending to go down, elect a Democrat. If you want it to go up, elect a Republican.
I think US conservatives have a more specific problem than that. Namely, they’re locked into cognitive dissonance about which ideology is actually at the root of their economic problems. American right-wingers have been thoroughly indoctrinated in the notion that problems are all the fault of the “liberal elites”, with their anticonservative movements for desegregation and women’s lib and gay rights and acceptance of diverse family structures and whatnot, to the extent that they’re very unwilling to recognize the harm being deliberately inflicted on them by conservative elites.
So they do a lot of angry flailing around about “taxes” and “identity politics” and “political correctness” and “socialism”, none of which is actually responsible for the huge spike in their insulin prices or the closure of their local factory, and they keep voting for more conservative elites who also make angry-sounding speeches about “taxes” and “identity politics” and “political correctness” and “socialism”. And none of it helps their problems because the conservative elites they’re electing don’t in fact give a shit about their problems, but they can’t acknowledge that because they’ve invested so heavily in the mistaken notion that the conservative elites are somehow “on their side”.
Which of the Democrats running for President in 2020 are going to decrease spending, and how and by how much?
Regards,
Shodan
Would it be Bernie Sanders? Elizabeth Warren? Joe Biden?
Regards,
Shodan
All of them.
How much? “One Greenland”
I’m not sure exactly how much a Greenland is, but we can decrease spending by at least that much by going Democrat.
Yeah, we must be in bizarro world if either one of those candidates actually wanted to cut the largest part of the discretionary budget, which is the military.
I mean, how many times have we heard Warren and Bernie talk about the need to buy more weapons??
Huh…it’s almost as if in the last 20 years, spending increased under Republicans and decreased under Democrats.
It’s ok to admit you don’t actually care about spending, as long as Republicans are in charge.
Actually it’s more like we should vote for Democrats who are promising to massively increase spending because they don’t really mean it.
It’s odd - right after I post cites that all the Democratic front-runners are going to increase spending, the Dope asserts that none of them will.
It’s OK to admit that you don’t actually care about spending as long as Democrats are in charge, too, but Dopers are determined not to do it.
Regards,
Shodan
Just like you continue to maintain that Trump and Obama were equivalently dishonest in their promises to reduce the deficit, despite evidence that reveals your bothsidesism as a laughable exercise in disingenuousness.
Congressional Budget Office report: If Not for Republican Policies, the Federal Government Would Be Running a Surplus.
Democrats tend to have a plan for increased spending by paying for it with increased taxes.
Republicans still cling to the magic of trickle down economics of tax cuts. Which gives them a rushing warm cozy feeling, like piss running down their leg and filling their shoe.