During the second daily news briefing of 2019 on Monday, the acting director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, was asked how the administration rationalized adding trillions of dollars to the national debt despite President Trump’s repeated campaign-trail insistence that the debt would drop.
“He also came into office and had an economic recovery that was needed to put people back to work, get the economy going and to rebuild the military, and had historic levels of military at $700 billion and $716 billion in — in national defense dollars,” Vought said. He didn’t mention that the debt has also been driven higher by a decline in corporate tax revenue after the 2017 Republican tax bill or that Trump had repeatedly railed against the debt added under former president Barack Obama when Obama also aimed to get Americans back to work.
Or, for that matter, that much of the debt added under Obama came when employment was actually suffering in the United States. Trump actually added debt at a faster rate during his first two years in office than Obama did in his last two. When Obama took office, the unemployment rate was 7.8 percent, in the middle of a climb that would eventually peak at 10 percent. The peak unemployment Trump has seen has been 4.7 percent — where it was when he took over.
View the complete March 11 article by Philip Bump on The Washington Post website here.