Everything Trump Gave us was Borrowed

I've been trying to get a point across - that Trump only gave us two good years and it was all borrowed - but I'm not an economist, a political scientist, a journalist, or even a great writer so it makes sense that people aren't rushing to know my opinion about Trump's economy.

But I think I'm right about this. And I think it's important because a lot of people aren't following the news but they remember feeling good about their buying power in the years before the pandemic without understanding that it was all a temporary high - it would have crashed hard under the weight of the massive debt and growing deficit.

Let's say I'm trying to impress a pretty but gullible woman so I borrow a big load of cash, buy some nice clothes, rent a fancy car, and take her to posh places. Maybe it works, but it can't last. If you think Trump was so great for the economy than I'm Trump in this example and you're my gullible date.

2017 was still Obama's year, and that's not unusual since it takes time for policy to kick in. Despite Trump coming on the scene like a bull scrapping TPP, rejiggering NAFTA, and threatening our trading partners, jobs and the GDP kept going as they had been for a while.. So Trump had us feeling good in 2018 and 2019, but it was all borrowed money. Trump borrowed an economy to make himself look good but he ran up the debt to a record level and kept running it up.

You could say that Barack Obama ran up the debt also, and that would be fair, but there were two important differences between Obama's debt and Trump's.

First, Obama inherited a crashing economy. Many voters are too young to remember how awful things were when Bush left office, but things were really bad. Obama's debt was, at least in part, Bush's debt.

The second difference is the deficit. For most of Obama's administration, the deficit was shrinking. That means that even though we were still borrowing and spending money, we were generating more and more revenue. We were heading toward a surplus - something that hadn't happened since the Clinton years - and we might have made it if Republicans didn't take Congress in 2015.

During the Trump years, the deficit only got worse. We were borrowing money and even though we were creating jobs, the government was losing revenue mostly because of Trump's tax cuts for the rich. Despite all of Trump's promises, - he had specifically promised to shrink the deficit - the government was spending more money than it was collecting and the gap was getting worse, and that was before COVID.

It wasn't just the economy that was borrowed. Trump borrowed peace by promising the Taliban that we would leave Afghanistan after the election, if they stop attacking Americans for a few months, and by fawning over dictators like Putin and Kim

Everything Trump gave us was borrowed and it was all destined to crash