After you read the facts on,
https://www.thebalancemoney.com/deficit-by-president-what-budget-deficits-hide-3306151
and an earlier post on this blog,
https://lebanoniznogood.blogspot.com/2025/03/like-gop-ex-presidents-deficit-growing.html
... it should outrage any decent citizen to recognize that every Republican president (Reagan, the Bushes, Trump...) have run budget deficits, while every Democrat president - except one, Obama - have run budget surpluses.
Here is a tally of budget deficits for recent administrations:
Donald Trump: $6.612 trillion, a 33% increase
Barack Obama: $6.781 trillion, a 58% increase
George W. Bush: $3.293 trillion, a 57% increase
Bill Clinton: $63 billion surplus, a 1% decrease
George H.W. Bush: $1.036 trillion, a 36% increase
Ronald Reagan: $1.412 trillion, a 142% increase
Bill Clinton is the champion of budget surpluses - i.e. his administration spent less money than it collected - he had four consecutive years of surplus, from 1998 to 2001. In fact, President Clinton oversaw the second longest period of peacetime economic expansion in American history. Months into his first term, he signed the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993, which raised taxes and set the stage for future budget surpluses. He signed the bipartisan Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act and won ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement, despite opposition from trade unions and environmentalists. Clinton's most ambitious legislative initiative, a plan to provide universal health care, failed to advance through Congress.
So when you hear naive and simpleton MAGA Republicans bitching about Democrats as "Tax and Spend" people, please tell them that they are lying and that the facts are otherwise.
Based on Dalio's prognostications below, you may want to do something to protect your savings.
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Ray Dalio issues his most dire warning to America yet: The ballooning $37 trillion debt will trigger an ‘economic heart attack’
Nick Lichtenberg
Updated Fri, July 25, 2025
Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates (Dia Dipasupil—Getty Images)
Hedge fund billionaire Ray Dalio is known for his dire warnings about the economy and the national debt, but he just issued one of his starkest warnings to date, likening the United States’ mounting debt crisis to an impending “economic heart attack” and urging policymakers to revisit the fiscal discipline that characterized the 1990s boom years. Dalio’s alarm, sounded in a series of social media posts and interviews, including with Fortune’s Diane Brady, comes as the national debt nears $37 trillion and the federal deficit continues to swell, fueling bipartisan anxieties about the country’s financial health.
Dalio, founder of the world’s largest hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates, described America’s deficit spiral in dramatic—and visceral—terms. “We’re spending 40% more than we’re taking in, and this is a chronic problem,” he said in a recent appearance on Fox Business. “What you’re seeing is the debt service payments … well into squeezing away, so it’s like plaque in the arteries squeezing away buying power.”
The analogy underscores a grim reality: Debt service payments have ballooned as a share of government spending, increasingly crowding out funds for other priorities. Dalio warns the U.S. is near a tipping point where it must issue new debt merely to pay interest on existing obligations—a cycle that he says could trigger not just a financial shock but a systemic breakdown reminiscent of cardiac arrest. We’ve got to go back, he argues—back to the ’90s.
A blueprint for recovery
Dalio contends that there is still a way out—as long as the country acts with unity and resolve. He points to the ’90s as a model for bipartisan problem-solving, fiscal restraint, and balanced economic growth. “If we change spending and income (tax returns) by 4% while the economy is still good,” he wrote on Twitter, “the interest rate will go down as a result, and we’ll be in a much better situation.” He added that we know this kind of balance can happen because it happened before, from 1991 to 1998, referencing how both spending controls and targeted tax measures restored equilibrium in the 1990s.
Dalio suggests that by trimming the federal deficit to 3% of GDP—levels last sustained during the Clinton era—the U.S. could stabilize markets, tame interest payments, and avoid a crisis. In a CNBC appearance in early July, Dalio put the odds at over 50% that a financial “trauma” will result from the debt not being dealt with properly.
Past warnings
This is far from the first dire warning to come from Dalio on the state of the U.S. economy. In the past five years, he has voiced concerns about the debt created to fight the financial effects of the pandemic, both inflation and stagflation, and even a looming recession. Although a recession has not set in since the COVID-related crash of 2020, Dalio warned that rising asset prices weren’t creating real wealth, as inflation was eroding purchasing power.
A consistent theme of Dalio’s warnings is that the disease may be worse than the cure, criticizing policymakers likely to act only when inflation became critical and the dollar’s value had materially eroded. He has voiced variations of his “heart attack” and “plaque” critique since 2024.
Despite offering a clear prescription, Dalio expresses skepticism that current political dynamics will allow for compromise or the hard choices required. “My fear is that we will probably not make these needed cuts due to political reasons,” he wrote on Twitter, warning that absolutism in Washington could doom efforts to put the country’s fiscal house in order.
The consequences, Dalio argues, would be severe and far-reaching: sustained government overspending, rising debt service burdens, and a loss of confidence among buyers of U.S. Treasuries. This scenario, he says, could escalate into what he calls a “serious supply-demand problem,” where the market refuses to fund America’s borrowing habits at sustainable rates, catalyzing a financial crisis with global shock waves. The April fall in the 10-year Treasury bond market was a tremor of just such a refusal from foreign investors, who seemed to balk at President Donald Trump’s planned tariffs being much more aggressive than expected.
Dalio’s repeated invocations of the 1990s are more than nostalgia—they are a call to bipartisan pragmatism and shared sacrifice. He warns that failure to act now, with the economy still on stable footing, will only raise the costs (and pain) of inevitable reforms. Although Dalio did not comment on it, the debt situation has actually worsened throughout 2025, with legislation passing through Congress that is set to expand the debt for years to come. Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act will add $3.4 trillion to deficits over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
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