Source: Congressional Budget Officeįalling deeper into the red is the opposite of what Trump, the self-styled “King of Debt,” said would happen if he became president. The Debt to GDP Ratio Is the Highest It's Been Since World War IIįederal debt held by the public as a percentage of gross domestic product since 1900. But unlike 75 years ago, the massive financial overhang from Medicare and Social Security will make it dramatically more difficult to dig ourselves out of the debt ditch. Our national debt has reached immense levels relative to our economy, nearly as high as it was at the end of World War II. So when the once-in-a-lifetime viral disaster slammed our country and we threw more than $3 trillion into COVID-19-related stimulus, there was no longer any margin for error. The combination of Trump’s 2017 tax cut and the lack of any serious spending restraint helped both the deficit and the debt soar. By the Trump administration’s own description, the pre-pandemic national debt level was already a “crisis” and a “grave threat.” That happened even though the economy was booming and unemployment was at historically low levels. TreasuryĮconomists agree that we needed massive deficit spending during the COVID-19 crisis to ward off an economic cataclysm, but federal finances under Trump had become dire even before the pandemic. The National Debt Increased Under Trump Despite His Promise to Reduce Itĭaily total national debt from 2009 to present. Bush and Abraham Lincoln, who oversaw the larger relative increases in deficits, Trump did not launch two foreign conflicts or have to pay for a civil war.

presidential administration, according to a calculation by a leading Washington budget maven, Eugene Steuerle, co-founder of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. The growth in the annual deficit under Trump ranks as the third-biggest increase, relative to the size of the economy, of any U.S.

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