Trump promised to balance the budget and lower the debt in his first term, but instead he raised the deficit significantly with Republicans in full control of congress. 40% of our national debt was added during his short 4 year tenure and the deficit EXPLODED…or to MAGA “promise kept”.

If paying down debt is important, you have to support ending the Bush and Trump tax cuts for the top 1%, that would more than balance the budget and start paying down debt all by itself with no cuts at all. Recovering 100% of the PPP loans would help. If lowering debt is important, it follows that you wouldn’t vote for someone who thinks incredibly high debt is good and repeated bankruptcy better, that is Trump’s business history….fraud, massive debts, repeated bankruptcy, and total failures.

“Both sides to blame”…who last balanced the budget, bob? Clinton.

And who took a surplus that had been lowering the debt and turned it into a doubling of the national debt and recession/depression in 8 short years?
Who just added $8 trillion to the debt in 4?
All Republicans.
The one thing the last 3 Republican presidents have is starting with an economic boom and causing a recession.
It’s just utter nonsense that republicans are better at the economy, they destroy it every single time they get control, then Democrats rebuild.

Yes but to converge the two sides have to acknowledge the arguments of the other side, unfortunately I am probably not arguing well enough and Im perfectly willing to just give up.

Anyway you seem to be able to research complicated topics well, you can read up about the history and end of the gold standard and about deflation for your own sake in your own time :-)

Fighting against fiat money, reserve banks, inflation and national debt is like fighting against democracy or free speech.
Sometimes democracy gives you Trump, sometimes free speech gives you porn (or worse, Fox news), sometimes the economy gets out of hand, but mostly these things work better than their alternatives and prevent or minimize crashes, based on the experience of the last 200 years. Every time someone thought better, they made things worse.

Trump supporters are delusional morons. Clinton and Obama had the two greatest economies in history. Clinton created more jobs than anyone , balanced the budget , and was actually paying down the national debt. Then what happened? Oh yea, bush and the fucking republicans took over.

Measuring the efficiency of "investment" into social programs is.. debatable.

This was the best 20 minutes on national debt I can remember to have seen or heard or read.

National debt is one of the hardest (yet closest to the skin) things to explain to people who have a lay attitude to economics. Right up there with Annual percentage rate and secondary effects of raising minimum wage.

Your video, The National Debt: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO), has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Trump claims the first stimulus package was for up to $6 trillion, not just two....and expects two more will be needed, making the bill for his inaction near $18-19 trillion by his estimates. That means all the outrage over Sanders plans to spend trillions on healthcare and education was utter bullshit (which we knew) or that the problem was we would get something for our money. Trump's just handing it out, largely without strings attached or getting any equity or concessions for it like Obama's bailouts did. Now THAT'S some serious socialism, meaning in just over 3 years his mismanagement would have more than doubled the national debt during an economic expansion (he added >$5 trillion without the pandemic, well over $1 trillion per year deficit before the economic collapse)....Conman Don, Don the Con, that's what they call him, I'm hearing people call him that, Don the Con.

It's all but guaranteed that he's going to just grab the Covid19 funds to build his wall, which is quickly becoming the wall America paid for FOR MEXICO who handled the pandemic infinitely better with only .3% of the cases America has and is stopping Americans from going to Mexico now.
(Side note, with immigrant harvesters staying home and crops rotting in the fields, expect food prices to skyrocket while unemployment also continues to skyrocket.)
@bobknight33 , comments?

More like selling ass, like he thinks he's a pimp and America is his bottom bitch. He's ok with any degradation of our nation if it makes money. He's incapable of measuring by or even comprehending any other metric.

Speaking of money, how's the deficit? How about the national debt? How much has he increased spending on rehabbing U.S. infrastructure? Where's my (much lower) tax bill on a 3x5" card?
What's the state of our union? It's looking fragile and tattered, so much that his cultists threaten to go to war with America if he's removed, even by losing the election. These are a few ways he's kicking ass for our enemies while abandoning or attacking multiple allies, weakening the U.S. further.

Another red tsunami 2020....just like the last two you predicted when republicans polled much higher and Trump hadn't recently admitted to stealing millions from veterans under oath. Can't wait.

I hope they start with him. ;-)

So, he thinks Russia has no churches!?! He thinks Venezuela is religion free?! Lol. What a maroon.
"If" they ever get power? Like 2008, when thousands of Christians were hunted like animals and murdered in the streets and organized religion was outlawed in America?....oh, wait....

UnChristian "Christians" like him are why people are fleeing religions like rats on a sinking ship.
The church is a bastion of pedophiles, racists, misogynists, and charlatans. I, for one, would support legal prosecution and even execution of the leaders of these evil cabals and most vile perpetrators from them, just like I would active members and leaders of NAMBLA, and the forfeiture of all church assets like any other criminal organization would see, they have each destroyed far more than one life, it's not unreasonable to think they should pay with their own. Just think of the dent that could make in the national debt and the criminals that would remove from our communities.

Even I, however, don't advocate (anti) religious warfare, what he's suggesting. I believe our legal system, properly and fairly applied, could easily and righteously eradicate most organized religions if only people didn't turn a blind eye towards their undeniable institutionalised crimes and sins.

Also, shouldn't any Christian hope they would be martyred, isn't that a free ticket into heaven in their belief system? Didn't Jebus tell them to turn the other cheek, not to strike first?

Upvote for exposure, not agreement

The last couple of decades I've really begun to see the military as corporate welfare. We have a force capable of crushing, literally crushing any non nuclear power nation 20 times over. We can never use that force against a significant nuclear power nation like Russia or China lest we risk WWW3, the war that will REALLY end all wars (by humanity at least). Our tech is also pretty much useless against a guerrilla force because they can melt across borders and into the local population.

Our outdated technology still would destroy any of the nations other than Russia or China. We have shit mothballed and decaying that would do so. We have a fucking stockpile of main battle tanks that we will never use, but we keep building them and storing them because, apparently, if you let the people go who know how to make them you can never replace that knowledge.

All the while, we let people get mired in school debt, credit debt, and increase our national debt because we need to crush some unknown force. We spend a fraction of what we should be spending on space exploration and colonization. I could go on, but why bother.

If you have any doubt, just look at the F35. By the time it is all said and done, we will have close to half a trillion sunk into that fucking debacle and it STILL isn't functioning capably. Russia and China haven't got anything close to it and we don't need it against anyone else. You could take that money and give close to 2 grand to every single man, woman, and child in the country. Instead we basically are lining Lockheed Martin's pockets.

15:05-15:30: you tell Mr and Mrs Front-Porch that your loonie of 1871 cannot be compared to your loonie of 2013 (year of this interview). You went off the gold standard in '33, you abandoned the peg in '70, and your currency has been free-floating ever since. Yes, the ratio of debt to GDP has some importance, but so does the nature of your currency. Just look at Greece and Japan, where the former uses a foreign currency and the latter uses its own, sovereign, free-floating currency.

Pay back the national debt -- have you thought that through?

First, the Bank of Canada is the monopolist currency issuer for the loonie, so explain to me in detail just how the issuer of the currency is supposed to borrow the currency from someone else? If you're the issuer of the currency, you spend it into existence, and use taxation as a means to create demand for your currency, and to free resources for the government to acquire, because you can only ever buy what is for sale.

Second, every government bond is someone else's asset. An interest-bearing asset. A very safe asset, in the case of Canada, the US, the UK, Japan, etc. "Paying back the debt" means putting a bullet into just about every pension fund in the world that doesn't rely exlusively on private equity or other sorts of volatile toilet paper.

There's a distributional issue with these bonds (they are concentrated in the hands of the non-working class, aka the rich), no doubt about it. But most of the other issues are strictly political, not economical.

What if the interest rate rises 1%? The central bank can lower the interest rate to whatever it damn well pleases, because nobody can ever outbid the currency issuer in its own currency. Remember, the central banks were the banks of the treasuries. The whole notion of an independent central bank was introduced to stop these pesky leftists from spending resources on plebs. That's why central banks were often removed from democratic control and handed over to conservative bankers. If the Treasury wants an interest rate of 2% on its bonds, it tells its central bank to buy any excess that haven't been auctioned off at this rate. End of story.

What if the market stops buying government bonds? Then the central bank buys the whole lot. However, government bonds are safe assets, and regulations demand a certain percentage of safe assets in certain portfolios, so there is always demand for the bonds. Just look at the German Bundesanleihen. You get negative real rates on 10 year bonds, and they are still in very high demand. It's a safe asset in a world of shitty private equity vaporware.

But, but.... inflation! Right, the hyperinflation of 2006 is still right around the corner. Just like Japan hasn't been stuck near deflation for two decades, and all the QE by the BoE and the ECB has thrown both the UK and the Eurozone into double-digit inflation territory. Not! None of these economies are running near maximum capacity/full employment, and very little actual spending (the scary, scary "fiscal policy") has been done.

But I'm going off track here, so.... yeah, you can pay back your public debt. Just be very aware of what exactly that entails.

As for the poster-child Latvia: >10% of the population left the country.

Here's a different poster-child instead, with the hindsight of another 4 years of austerity in Europe after this interview: Portugal. The Portuguese government told Master of Coin Schäube to take a hike, and they are now in better shape than the countries who just keep on slashing.

On a different note: Marx was wrong about the proletariat. Treating them like shit doesn't make them rebellious, it makes them lethargic. Otherwise goons like Mario Rajoy would have had their comeuppance by now.

PS: Blyth's book on Austerity is an absolute must-read for anyone interested in its history or its current effects in particularly the Eurozone.

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To be fair some of those programs should be eliminated. In the big picture these table scrap spending issues.

Homeless need food and shelter more than I need PBS or GOV funded arts programs.

Americans need to work longer before opting for social security.

Our defense spending does need to be cut.

Our national debt does need to be lowered.

WE need not to be fighting if /when defenses cutting / social security adjustments issues come up.

Death panels and throwing grandma off the cliff scare tactics need to stop.

Hasn't SHE also been filmed mocking Trump at her rallies...another person with disabilities, but his are purely mental.

EDIT: Also, is his mocking a disabled man really the most important flub he's made? Wouldn't disputing some of his policies be more to the point and make more of a difference. I mean, we already know he's a douchebag, and that's a selling point for most of his followers, not a deal breaker. Explain how his tax plan doubles the national debt, raises taxes on all non millionaires, and ends all social programs many of his followers use to live, while drastically lowering tax rates on millionaires and making it easier for them to hide money and move businesses out of the country, contrary to what he tells them in his rallies. I see this as a huge part of the problem this election, it's become all about personality, nothing of substance at all, because neither main candidate wants to discuss their plans or history.

EDIT: The following statement has been found to be inaccurate.

Um...keep in mind that she's NOT the nominee yet, people. It's another lie from her campaign, repeated by all media organizations.
A candidate needs 2383 PLEDGED delegates to win the nomination. She has 2184. Because there seems to be some question among Clinton supporters, 2184 < 2383. She's 199 short. That doesn't mean Sanders has much chance, it means the claim that "she won the nomination" is a BOLD FACED LIE that apparently 90% of Americans are gullible and ignorant enough to buy. Don't be a sucker and fall for then repeat another lie. Wait for the convention before calling her the nominee. She didn't win yet.

That conveniently leaves out the fact that income tax rates have plummeted since the 1940s. That's been the big consistent change, not the government increasing spending as a percentage of GDP, which wildly fluctuates.

The reason why there's a fight to get this funded is because there's a portion of this country that thinks you must pay for every new expenditure by cutting spending elsewhere because the national debt will kill us if it doesn't come down, and taxes can never ever ever ever ever be raised ever ever ever ever. They will absolutely never consider that raising taxes is worth funding anything, and are completely okay with cutting funding for things that are even needed and are worth the money (see cutting funding for PBS).

I say "principled" because they sure don't ask for reduced spending to pay for when they need help. See Katrina and other disasters, Mitch McConnell's fund to help nuclear power workers, etc.

But the fundamental problem here is the flat refusal to accept the reality that:
1. The national debt and annual deficits can, will, and should fluctuate depending upon circumstances. The "sky is falling" reaction to added debt is beyond ridiculous. This country has flourished economically under almost non-stop deficit spending. This isn't to say raising the national debt and running annual deficits is always good, but it sure as hell isn't always bad.
2. The same reaction to tax raises is also ridiculous. Tax rates can be increased or decreased, depending on circumstances, and raising or lowering them isn't inherently good or bad.

A sane reaction to this whole thing isn't - "well, they spend money on things that don't matter, so that's why this can't be funded."

It's "I don't care if it costs every single one of us an extra dollar in taxes in a year, or we need to cut funding on (insert wasteful program here), we need to get this done."