Something you will never see on Fox

[SickOfTheOnePct]

20. Looking at only the deficit...

...in the first year and last year of administration does nothing more than show you the static information for those two years, but shows nothing about the what was going on with the deficit in the intervening years, nor the overall impact to the national debt, which is the number that has the longest term impact. If Reagan's deficit number in 1989 had been $50 billion, the chart would have correctly shown that he reduced the deficit by $29 billion, but would have ignored all the years in between when the deficit was high and the national debt was increasing.

Using the chart for Reagan's terms for example, you could say that he increased the deficit by $73.6 billion, which doesn't sound horrible, given recent numbers. But when you look at each year of deficits, and calculate what was added to the national debt, it's $1.412 trillion over 8 years.

Plus, looking at the deficit at the beginning of a term and the end of a term doesn't account for anything that happened in the intervening years that required unexpected big hikes in spending.

Bill Clinton is the only President in the chart that actually subtracted from the national debt, and everyone else added to it.

Reagan: $1.412 trillion (8 years, $177B/year)
Bush I: $1.036 trillion (4 years, $259B/year)
Clinton: -$62.8 billion (8 years,, $-7.85B/year)
Bush II: $3.534 trillion (8 years, $442B/year) (9/11, wars, Great Recession)
Obama: $6.557 trillion (8 years, $820B/year) (Great Recession)
Trump: $7.663 trillion (4 years, $1.92T/year) (COVID)
Biden: $4.9 trillion (3 years, because they only show the first three fiscal years of his administration, $1.6T/year) (COVID)

As for whether or not Democrats have been better stewards of the national debt, pre-Clinton and Clinton, yes, Democrats were definitely better. Post-Clinton it's hard to tell, because every President since him has had some kind of national crisis that had to be dealt with, primarily the Great Recession and COVID, which naturally increased spending.

For Bush II, deficits were going back down during his second term until the Great Recession hit, so it's impossible to tell what his final year of deficit would have been.

For Obama, he brought down deficits that were at their peak during the Great Recession, but in his final two years in office, deficits were creeping back up. Had he not had to do the initial spending for the Great Recession, thus already starting him in a deep hole, would he eventually gotten to a balanced budget? No way to know.

For Trump, deficits were going up, no question, and then exploded during COVID, so he was definitely adding to the debt bigly, even before COVID.

For Biden, he brought the deficit down from peak COVID spending, but they immediately started going up again. Would he have brought them back down in a second term? No way to know.

All of this is to say that showing a starting number and an ending number, and using that to prove that someone is doing a great job or someone is doing a crappy job isn't necessarily valid.