Heads Up, Donald! The UniParty Has Booby-Trapped The Economy

Donald Trump is returning to the Oval Office after skipping a term—a feat accomplished only one time before by Grover Cleveland in the late 19th century.

But Donald Trump is no Grover Cleveland. The latter was a free trade, sound money/gold standard backer of Jeffersonian small government. Moreover, during his first term he balanced the budget every year, and did so at rates relative to GDP that would leave today’s Keynesian economists flat-out gobsmacked and their DSGE (Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium) models puking-out molten statistical debris.

Indeed, given the outcomes shown below, President Cleveland surely deserved a second term or at least a fiscal bronze star. At the peak in 1887 the Federal surplus reached 22.3% of GDP, and for the four years as a whole Cleveland’s cumulative surpluses of $164 million paid off nearly 10% of the entire Civil War debt.

Federal Surplus and % of GDP:

• 1885: $18 million/7.7% of GDP.

• 1886: $49 million/20.6% of GDP.

• 1887: $56 million/22.3% of GDP.

• 1888: $41 million/16.0% of GDP.

By any standard of fiscal rectitude, by contrast, the Donald did not remotely deserve a second term. In the month before he took office, the public debt clocked in at $20.0 trillion, which figure stood at nearly $28 trillion the month he grudgingly took his leave.

So for crying out loud. That $7.9 trillion gain in just 48 months was more than had been accrued by the first 43 US presidents during the first 216 years of US history. And that’s to say nothing of the Donald’s penchant for expansive government, printing press money and “big beautiful tariffs”.

At the end of the day, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more anti-Cleveland president than Donald J. Trump. Even the pedigreed RINO, George HW Bush, once asked your editor if they really had a printing press in the basement of the Eccles Building and whether it could be run at a more moderate speed!

$8 Trillion Rise of the Public Debt During Trump 1.0