I recently went on a bit of a disaster-preparedness kick. Ever since my parents lost power in an ice storm for three weeks, many years back, I've been aware of the value of being able to be self-sufficient for a stretch -- because my parents heated with a wood-stove they were able to stay comfortably at home while many neighbors wound up in shelters. So, I've gradually built out a more robust system for temporary self-sufficiency for my own family, over time. As part of that, I've been listening to some prepper podcasts and Youtube series for tips, and it's really fascinating stuff. Although they sometimes have valuable information, it tends to come straight out of a deranged form of right-wing political paranoia -- they spent the Obama years convinced martial law, economic collapse, or social meltdown was looming, even as we went through eight years that were damned quiet even by US standards (no recessions starting, declining crime rates, no major terrorist attacks or new wars, etc.)
Anyway, one of the Preppers did a new post-Trump podcast where he reshuffled his warnings. He used to be convinced economic collapse was imminent, and rated it above issues like terrorist attacks, rioting, pandemic, etc., for the kinds of "grid down" event he was worried about. Now he's pushed economic collapse down the list, convinced that with Trump as president, there's not as big a risk of that. His prior worry about economic collapse was all based on our "sky high" debt levels, and he thinks Trump has that under control. This strikes me as bizarre. Whatever you think of Trump's economic policies overall, shouldn't it be obvious that debt is likely to rise quickly in coming years?
Since Trump has come out with several very different plans for tax cuts (depending on whether he was competing with the Republicans or with Clinton, he believed in different things). But, all of his plans involve massive tax cutting of one form or another. The most aggressive of the plans would cost $9.5 trillion in extra debt over the next decade:
http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/publications/analysis-donald-trumps-tax-plan/full
Other analysis puts different iterations of his plans at a ten-year cost of between $2.6 trillion and $5.9 trillion:
https://taxfoundation.org/details-analysis-donald-trump-tax-plan-2016/
http://money.cnn.com/2016/09/19/news/economy/trump-tax-plan-cost/
Those lower numbers are from the right-wing Tax Foundation, which has a propagandistic tendency to underestimate the revenue cost of tax cuts. Yet, even they are projecting an absolute revenue meltdown if Trump gets his way. Even the most optimistic of projections of the most modest of his plans would involve us plunging into debt more than 25% faster than the present pace. The least optimistic projection of the most aggressive of his plans would almost double the rate of debt increase.
Of course, you might think there's no way Trump will get everything he wants (despite having Republicans in control of both houses of Congress), but even half that would be a budget nightmare, especially paired with increases in spending in our biggest area of discretionary spending (the military), along with his hyper-expensive border wall. GW Bush tried something similar and managed to turn a record budget surplus into a record budget deficit in just three years.
And that new debt of $2.6 trillion to $9.5 trillion, over the next decade, would just be the new debt attributable to the tax cuts -- it wouldn't count the ongoing debt run up from deficits projected even before those cuts, or any debt associated with higher federal spending levels, if Trump gets his promised military spending boost, etc. So, that Prepper's confidence that the debt issue is no longer as scary as he imagined in the Obama years runs directly at odds with realistic budget projections.
If you were laid back about debt a few years ago, maybe the new, darker path still isn't dark enough to worry you. But if you were in a panic before, things should seem even more troubling now. Yet I can't remember the last time I heard one of our conservatives on this forum fret about debt and deficits, the way they regularly did in the Obama years. That suggests to me that, for them, those weren't really driving issues. Their drive to criticize Obama came first, and then they rummaged around looking for something to use as the nominal topic of attacks on him, with debt being a convenient one. Now that they feel their team is in charge, debt doesn't bother them any more than it did when the policies of Reagan and Bush were super-charging it.
Am I right? Like the Trump-loving Prepper, have you found your fear of debt fading even as the likely rate of debt increase has grown? Or are you even more concerned than in the past, and just not bothering to mention it any more?
