Generally starts with the person referring to Trump tax cuts and then the debt as a dishonest means to suggest that he decreased revenues to add to the debt.
Of course, this argument didn't work during the election, but that doesn't mean certain people will not still suggest that it is true and relevant. It is an easy misdirection that can be used to undermine what Trump is attempting to do with the DOGE, Musk and Ramaswamy, and their plan to cut government fat. For all practical purposes the argument being presented is that we cannot trust Trump to cut the deficit because he previously cut taxes and added 7 trillion in debt.
By this argument, one would think that the tax cuts shrunk the revenue stream. But as you can see, revenues did not decrease, but rather increased from around 3.2 trillion to nearly 3.5 trillion in 2019, before 2020 and covid cut them back to just over 3.4 trillion. This is not all that inconsistent with the previous eight years under Obama where the revenue stream went from 2.6 trillion to 3.3 trillion (under 100 billion increase per year). The reality is that 2020 and the global pandemic changed everything, including how our CBO looked at the budget, the deficit and the national debt.
So if you look at the deficit you will see these numbers which add up to about 5.6 trillion, with a bulk coming in 2020.
2017 - 714 billion
2018 - 785 billion
2019 - 991 billion
2020 - 3.1 trillion
But if you look at the "debt" (which one would think would match the deficit) you see the numbers that add up to 6.9 trillion with 4.2 trillion of that in 2020.
2017 - 498 billion
2018 - 1.1 trillion
2019 - 1.1 trillion
2020 - 4.2 trillion
Now this 4.2 was somewhat of an accounting gimmick. They basically took all of the Covid stimulus spending that was spread out over 2020 and 2021 and added it to an increase in debt in 2020. So even though we had a deficit of 2.7 trillion in 2021 (Biden's first year), we only increased the debt by 1.2 trillion. Seems sort of odd that you can spend almost 3 trillion more than you brought in, but only increase debt by 1.2 trillion. But that is the way the accounting worked.
Lastly, whether you want to look at the 3.1 trillion in deficit or the 4.2 trillion in debt, the lion's share of that number had to do with one time stimulus spending because of Covid. Bipartisan support to borrow massive amounts of money to assist with a global pandemic that locked our entire economy down for nearly two years was the reason we see these giant deficit and debt numbers. They literally had nothing do to with the tax cuts.
Perhaps the best way to look at this is to compare the first three years of the Trump revenue versus outlays (as a President cannot control how bean counters decide to calculate debt) against the revenue and outlays of the second and third year of the Biden administration (as their fourth and final years is not in the books). What you would see is that Trump showed a three year deficit of 2.490 trillion, while Biden showed a two year deficit of 3.029 trillion. You don't need to have a math major to see that when it comes to fiscal sanity, that Trump was way more sane than Biden has been. I suspect he will continue to be way more fiscally sane than he previously was... tax cuts or not.
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