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Comment by _heimdall | Hacker News Reader

Is your argument that one party overspends worse than the other? That certainly is true, though how many externalities are included would be up for debate. Regardless though, my problem is with the over spending, not with which is party over spends less.

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You said it wasn't a "one party is the problem" situation.

But how can you conclude that if you don't have those numbers to give me?

Switching gears to externalities seems like a bit of a dodge unless you are super confident that those externalities are more significant than the bad things you predict happening in the future due to the debt.

Don't you need to look at the numbers to justify that claim? Maybe one party has added 30T and another has added 5T to the debt since Carter. Maybe one has added 20T and the other added 18T. Those numbers would demand VERY different responses.

But saying "it's not one party" seems to assume a particular set of numbers. What are they?

Your argument is absurd. You seem to take issue with my arguments and the examples I gave and demand I owe you numbers and statistics. But you're making your own arguments ad though they are correct without providing your own data.

I think we even agree that one party will outspend the other. You're ignoring my entire point that running a deficit is the problem and both parties are guilty of doing it and both parties continue to push for even more spending on policies they happen to agree with.

You made the initial claim that it wasn't a "one party is the problem," shouldn't that be your own responsibility to substantiate?

"I think we even agree that one party will outspend the other."

I'd rephrase it to out-deficit the other because you could spend more AND bring in more revenue and improve the situation. If we do that, then yes, that's certainly my hunch, but I didn't pull any numbers. Maybe the covid-era timing of Trump-vs-Biden plays out wildly different, maybe some of the Obama-era stuff cost more than I'm recalling. Seems necessary to know to know if it's one party is MUCH better than the other or just one party is a bit better than the other.

>You're ignoring my entire point that running a deficit is the problem and both parties are guilty of doing it and both parties continue to push for even more spending on policies they happen to agree with.

My reason for asking for the data is that the best action to take depends on the magnitudes. If one party is dramatically better than the other then the most practical way of fixing your problem is likely to be do everything you can to get that party more power AND work to shift it into the positive vs try to burn both parties down.

You're still deflecting off my actual argument, latching onto only the first sentence, and demanding stats where none are needed.

I said its not a one party problem and then went on to very clearly explain that both parties overspend our income and run deficits. Are you refuting that? No exact stats are needed there because its common knowledge that we haven't run a balanced budget since Clinton was in office.

You seem to be arguing with a point that I never said. I didn't claim which party had spent more, for that I would have to double check the numbers and adjust for inflation.

Public debt is a ratchet because the private holders on the other side decide how much of it there is.

Why don't you post the numbers, then? Here they are for the past 25 years:

Bush: +$4.9T Obama: +$9.3T Trump 1: +$7.8T Biden: +$8.5T Trump 2: +$4.4T

I don't think there's much point in quibbling over which party has added more to the national debt. The point is that both parties have been irresponsible in different ways, and neither supports the policies necessary to balance the budget: tax increases and cuts to entitlements.

> Bush: +$4.9T Obama: +$9.3T Trump 1: +$7.8T Biden: +$8.5T Trump 2: +$4.4T

> I don't think there's much point in quibbling over which party has added more to the national debt.

That is correct, because it was the Republicans. Looking at Obama:

* https://www.us-debt-clock.com/presidents

note how his second term is half what his first term was? Perhaps that's because his first term was about dealing with the GFC that occurred under Bush's watch. Obama's second term was about the same (in adjusted/2026 dollars) as Bush's second: it seems the high level of spending that Obama did was (a) to first clean up the GFC mess, and (b) paying for the military adventures kicked of by the GOP.

And notice how Clinton 1 was lower than that of the previous three GOP terms? And how Clinton 2 was even lower? See how under Bush it suddenly jumps?

To a certain extent Trump 1 and Biden had to deal with COVID, so there's some leeway there, but Trump 1 also saw a huge tax cut passed in 2019 (before COVID), so there was going to be deficits under his watch (and, surprise, the tax cuts did not 'pay for themselves'):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_Cuts_and_Jobs_Act

Trump alone has added a quarter of the total debt that the US currently has—and we're barely through half his second term:

* https://time.com/article/2026/08/21/national-debt-trump-bide...

The two parties are not equivalent: one starts wars and gives taxes cuts to the rich, the other does not. Just about every major problem that the US has had to deal with over the last few decades has been started under GOP leadership.

I didn't post them because I didn't bother looking them up, and wanted the person making the claim to check into it. Thanks for actually sharing!

That presentation does support their claim that both parties need to get back to basics on that matter.

Though now that I'm a bit more invested, looking at deficit delta by year for each of those tells a bit more.

Bush's went up then started to fall until 2008. Obama inherited that mess and he+his Congress spent to get out of it then made it shrink continually until a bump back up in 2016. Trump increased the deficit every single year (and enormously so in 2020, another disaster response incident). It shrank back under Biden in 2021 and 2022 then ticked back up, Trumps' now got it trending back up again after a tiny decrease in 2025.

The thing that changes with that view is that Trump appears to be the big outlier here, who's never really managed to bring it down at all or even try. And there's a fun macro-trend of both of those Democrats only getting elected into shits-on-fire circumstances. Clinton didn't have the problem, maybe that's why he did better.

You didn't post them because you were arguing with a point I didn't make. I didn't say both parties spend just as much, I said both parties overspend and run deficits. The average person shouldn't need to fact check such an obvious statement.

Your attempts here to deflect all spending from the president in office to the party you disagree with is also a bit too obvious. You had no counter argument to my actual point and were instead fishing for me to provide exactly those numbers so you could do exactly this deflection.

Given that you wanted so badly for me to look up numbers, I'd love to hear you justify that running deficits is not a problem of only one party.

But you only have 2 parties. If you vote for the party that over spends less you show that this is an election winning strategy and will influence governing more.

There's no legal limitation on how many parties we have, we simply haven't moved past two main parties since Hamilton and Jefferson were after each other.

U popular opinion for sure, and I'm not even saying it as my view today, but there is argument to be made that we don't own anyone a vote and if both parties are terrible options we can walk away and engage elsewhere. If I really believed both parties were bad options, I'd focus on working with my local community as much as possible. If the federal government can't represent me in anyway then I'd be walking out of that system as much as possible.

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