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Originally Posted by Cherie
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Do you even read your own links? If you do, do you understand them.
Donald Trump had nothing to do with the debt ceiling ....in fact he just encouraged Congress to raise it which they did. Trump bumped up against a debt ceiling.
I highly doubt you will admit your distortion.
Causes
The Truth Division, a conservative, openly pro-Trump web site, clearly attributes this decline in the national debt to the president, claiming he and his administration are “undoing the government’s rampant spending” and “keeping his promises regarding fiscal responsibility”. However, the article does not cite any examples of
actions taken by Donald Trump which would support this conclusion.
Jared Bernstein, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and former economic adviser to Vice President Joe Biden, dismissed any claims that President Trump is responsible:
Trump hasn’t legislated anything that would have any impact on the fiscal accounts, so it simply doesn’t make sense on the face it.
Instead, Bernstein told us, the cause of the drop in the debt is simple — the federal debt ceiling that has been in place since March 2017.If you look at a plot of the total debt right now, it’s holding steady at the limit, because to go over the limit is unconstitutional. So you either have to engage in extraordinary measures or eventually default, and the latter is unimaginable so right now Treasury is engaged in the former.
That is, they are delaying or suspending various payments that need to be made, particularly within some of their intra-governmental accounts… By those measures, they can hold the national debt where it is for a certain amount of time.
Eventually, Bernstein says, the debt ceiling will have to be lifted, and the payments that had been delayed will cause the national debt to increase once again.
That pattern can be seen in this chart, which shows the national debt from January 2011 up to the end of July 2017. There are four flat lines showing four periods during which the debt ceiling was frozen: from May to August
2011; May to October
2013; March to October
2015; and the ongoing period since March 2017.
