[Beernoser]

In Trump’s defense though,. I don’t think it’s so much moving left as actually having no idea what he’s talking about. When he said he could pay off the debt in eight years, he didn’t do the math. He was just saying what sounded good.

How people can be taken in by him is beyond me.

[kinsman redeemer]

He was just saying what sounded good.

Right there, in a nutshell is the whole Trump campaign strategy. Problem is, he's limited to 3 syllable words.

[lepton]

When he said he could pay off the debt in eight years, he didn’t do the math.

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I recall doing the math in 1992. At that time, as I recall, simply limiting growth in spending to typical inflation plus population growth would have brought the deficit to zero in a little less than 4 years, with debt being eaten in big bites thereafter.

Now, the deficit is larger, and the debt is so large and the economy so distorted that any upward interest rate would eat the growth in revenues and likely surpass it. Further, a significant part of current growth is artificially fed by funneling money into the economy that shutting off the faucet - which has to happen at some point - would cause serious disruption to the economy.

I haven’t dug back into the numbers, but a couple of years ago, it was $2.3T in fake money caused $300B in GDP growth. While that net hemorrhaging of $2T a year would likely lessen considerably, it would still be huge.