In 2006 the deficit was about $248 billion. Democrats called it unpatriotic. They said tax cuts had killed the economy and skyrocketed the deficit. They said America was going to go bankrupt. Conservatives stayed home, Democrats ran a group of so-called “blue dog” candidates who said they cared about the deficit.
Those blue dogs are gone now. In 2007 when Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid came into power and Democrats took over the House and Senate, the deficit had dropped to $160 billion. Then came the regulation and the spending. By 2008 when Obama was elected the deficit was up to half a trillion and in Obama’s first year as President the deficit was $1.4 trillion. Democrats lost Congress in 2010 and as Republicans gained more control the deficit slowly dropped. In 2013, it was below $1 trillion again.
Democrats don’t care about the deficit. If they did, they would talk about cutting spending. Tax hikes have a negative effect on the economy, and a poorly producing economy means less tax revenue. But Democrats want tax hikes because it allows them to spend more and accomplish their goal of redistributing wealth from GDP producers to their voters. So if they can use a high deficit to say we need to raise taxes, they will.
How do we know they don’t actually care about the deficit? Because Democrats view every dollar cut from anything but the military as draconian austerity measures that throw Grandma off a cliff. They even include that in their advertising. Democrats, in addition to opposing any non-military spending cuts, have proposed spending that would double our entire US budget. They want to spend $3.2 trillion a year on universal healthcare and another trillion a year on guaranteed tuition and jobs. Even if they cut the entire $600 billion military budget and took every penny of the $2 trillion held by America’s billionaires, they would still need to tax every day Americans an additional $2 trillion a year. Compare that to Trump’s tax cuts that cost $200 billion a year.
The Democrat budget wish list would cost Americans 20 times Trump’s tax cuts. And there simply aren’t enough dollars in existence in America to pay for it. Don’t tell me the Democrats care about deficits.