More specifically, Congress, which doesn't always align with the Executive. Congress largely sets the spending (or not) agenda. The Executive can ask nicely but Congress mostly does what it does.

Outside of retirees, much of the social safety net is funded at the State level. There is a wide variance in the benefits and quality of the social safety net across States.

Medicaid is administered at the state level but funded federally, as a number of people might discover next month.

"The Executive can ask nicely but Congress mostly does what it does."

Oof

but were they winning as hard as the current administration?

So weak trollish humor is allowed on here now apparently.

It is a difficult balance to strike. Unless you outlaw _all_ jokes, there will be some jokes that are just on the line of “funny enough”/“not too trollish”. Personally i find this kind of joke hilarious, but people will all have different tastes

I don't come here for jokes, so I downvote pretty much any joke I see, regardless of whether or not I think it's funny or clever.

look at me: i'm the downvoter now

What is trollish? The "winning" is copied verbatim from White House communique.

Weak trollish humor is now allowed in the White House as well. What's left of it.

Evidenced by: Your mom.

Some may miss the meta meta.

> White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt responded minutes later with: “Your mom did.”

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/white-house-wild-response-to-...

Your account was made today.

So what? Are they supposed to make an account weeks before they have something to say?

If you don't want to appear impulsive, yes.

It used to be common nettiquete to expect new account to "lurk" and refrain from posting until they actually learned the norms of board culture and how to behave as expected.

Hacker News would be much better if all new accounts were banned by default until they were vouched for by users and earned a minimum amount of karma. I understand why this doesn't happen, but the problem of green accounts trolling and posting toxicity seems far worse than occasional mediocre humor.

> Hacker News would be much better if all new accounts were banned by default until they were vouched for by users and earned a minimum amount of karma.

Personally, I prefer the model used by lobsters and Tildes where you have to be invited to the community by another member.

I find that a bit too extreme, although I understand why it's attractive. I like HN's "open door" policy, but I think green account abuse is just too rampant and it's getting worse. That isn't the fault of new people, it's the fault of established posters who want to troll while keeping their karma and reputations intact.

I'd submit if you want to make an argument about HN norms and conventions and what is "allowed" to be posted in a comment, demonstrating that you're actually a part of the community you're attempting to police is a good idea, yeah.

What the fuck does that matter? And no, it wasn't made today.

It matters because now he can't follow you around and downvote you on the basis of just your username.

The joke accurately conveys that the current administration has no actual upside and won power purely on Populism, while the opposition party clearly put the country in a better place while they were in power. I think it’s funny, accurate, and informative.

Not sure if you're misinformed or lying intentionally but you are incorrect and anyone here who can flag you comment should do so.

Only right leaning comments get flagged on hn

I've made plenty of left leaning comments that got flagged. Try arguing against the literal truth of the Bible or the necessity of religion to morality or society, for instance. Or that vaccines work. Or that free market capitalism has flaws and socialism has merits. Or that transgender identity is valid. Or that DEI is valid. Or that feminism is valid. Or that immigration and multiculturalism are valid. Or that gun control is valid.

There are tons of left leaning views that get flagged on HN. What matters isn't political polarity but the specific zeitgeist of the thread and whether you go with it or against it, and who happens to show up first with the most downvotes.

Often a surplus? 1 time ever more like. I think its pretty low-brow to act like a presidential administration can be the single biggest cause of a major turnaround within its own administration. One administration is facing knock-on from several previous (plus all the tech advancement, trade deals, congress, SC).

Nobody said "Often a surplus"?

I believe the post was edited, but I have no proof.

Fair enough! It probably was.

always been like that. GOP takes power then cuts taxes so they can yell about the deficit, which gives them leverage to cut spending.

It actually isn't as simple as 'always,' as military spending alone as an axis of evaluation yields interesting nuance

curious to hear more about your argument. can you expand it? "an axis of evaluation yields interesting nuance" is vague and meaningless. can you please be more direct about it with plain english without academic-y phrases? it's easier for a reader to agree or disagree when you use simple words with direct statements to make your argument.

They don't care about the spending. They yammer about it as a way of shifting funds towards things they care about, like the military or their new gestapo or buying votes from their disaffected constituents, but they've never given a shit about the deficit, and have never done anything to stop it.

The closest they ever came to actually caring about government was with Musk who went in and actually started (illegally) ripping shit out. But the things he ripped out were inconsequential things that conservatives didn't like, and he didn't even make a dent in the actual budget. All of the things that Musk got rid of were congressionally appropriated and could have easily been congressionally (i.e. legally) de-appropriated accordingly and it supposedly would be easy for them to do with majority control over the house, senate, executive, and judiciary...but they didn't do it, because they don't actually want to cut the budget.

> they don't actually want to cut the budget

Eh, I would say its well-known in deficit circles that all politicians (intellectually) desire to balance the budget, but it is basically impossible. Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, and debt servicing are such large pieces of the debt pie that the entirety of discretionary spending makes basically no impact in balancing the budget. These are de-facto untouchable obligations because too many people's lives depend on them and any party that enacts austerity will be swept out of office. Neither party will increase taxes on themselves (the rich) and taxing the middle/poor guarantees you lose the next election. The only path forward in the U.S. is basically kicking the can down the road until it implodes like so many other high debt-load western nations before them.

No Democrat has run an actual budget surplus in the past 50 years. Bill Clinton's supposed two budget surplus years were in fact short-falls. Debt expanded $200+ billion the two Clinton budget surplus years and actual revenue failed to cover actual federal expenditures. They used magic math to lie about that surplus.

Obama and Biden ran gigantic budget deficits.

None of which is meant to paint the Republicans in a good light. Why pretend the Democrats are doing something they're not? Extreme partisan politics is the single biggest problem the US has right now.

Every Republican administration in the last 50 years (save Bush Sr.) has passed a giant tax cut without cutting spending nearly enough to pay for it (and usually increasing spending). Trump himself has done this twice.

Let's not pretend like the two parties are the same with regard to fiscal irresponsibility.

The U.S. government structurally cannot run a surplus because when they have income in excess of obligations they store it in U.S. Treasury bonds, which creates offsetting debt.

> Obama and Biden ran gigantic budget deficits

If you actually look at the deficit year by year, Obama and Biden each entered office with a huge economic crisis that ballooned the deficit, and then lowered it year by year. I mean, it was highest under Trump.

And if you look at Bush and Trump, they started with a lower deficit and raised it year by year.

If your marker is a "budget surplus", nobody does that. The only people that get close are Democrats because they literally reduce spending. And then a Republican takes office, bangs on about the deficit so they can slash social programs, but spends even more than they slashed on military. This is not hidden information.

You don't care that ~15% of federal spending is interest on the debt?

I don't. One of the largest holders of US debt is US citizens' investment and retirement accounts. It's a win-win situation

Republicans objectively don't

You're referencing a chart like this:

https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/INTERAC...

Notably when the background is red, the line goes down, and when the background is blue, the line goes up.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/5/20/the-us-has-36-trill...

And this is why politics is broken in the US, and in most of the Western world for that matter. What you just said is completely false, but it's being rewarded because people want it to be true. Here [1] is data on the annual deficit. [1] We've only run a "surplus" four times since 1970. Twice under George W Bush, twice under Clinton. Since then it's been going mostly into loony land.

The reason for the quotes is because that's an incomplete picture since various things can affect the debt without being noted in the annual deficit. For instance some programs are considered off-budget, there's various accounting restructuring, and so on. If you simply look at the total debt it has increased every year (again since at least 1970) with the only exception being 1999 to 2000 depending on when you measure it. If you look end of year vs end of year (as opposed to fiscal year), it decreased by a few billion dollars, and that was the only time.

[1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFSD

How are you reading this graph? There is a surplus and it's not "twice under Bush."

https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/natio...

And the graph clearly shows we trend towards less spending under Democrats and then Republicans spend more again.

The years of a nominal surplus were 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001. In reality, the only "real" surplus (in other words the public debt decreased) was in 2000, and it was negligible.

I don't find the partisan arguments interesting. Bush had a lower deficit (each and every year) invading and occupying two different countries than any president has ever achieved since then. That is not to praise Bush, but to emphasize that we're comparing horrible vs terrible and trying to argue over which is which. They're all miserable failures, and not just in regards to spending.

Are there any things you are leaving out in 2008 and 2020-2021 in this analysis though? One self-inflicted from deregulating the finance industry, another a black swan event.

Running wars is a choice, a pandemic hitting not so much.

COVID was a black swan, the completely irresponsible and unnecessary redistribution from taxpayers to company owners that was the PPP was a choice. (One that most other governments worldwide didn’t make.)

Ah, yes, for PPP you're absolutely correct, also:

> The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) is a $953-billion business loan program established by the United States federal government during the Trump administration in 2020

> The years of a nominal surplus were 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001.

That's still not twice under George W. Bush, who became President on Jan. 20, 2001, nearly three weeks into calendar year (and nearly four months into federal fiscal year) 2001.

I do appreciate the nitpick - my count was indeed off by one. Now if people only did anything even remotely similar for posts that confirmed their biases. The post I was responding to (that has been repeatedly edited) originally claimed that 'democrats often have budget surpluses' when in reality the only real budget surplus (in that the public debt declined) was 26 years ago, and of a tiny fraction of a percent.

maybe take a “how to read graphs and follow along” course somewhere :) wild, wild stuff… seldom do I see such self-own, made my evening

Are you serious? California has an $180 billion annual obligation just for Medicaid (Cal-Aid). Los Angeles borrowed $1 billion to fund DWP operations this year, and borrowed $3 billion to borrow another $3 billion to fund a $6 billion renovation for the LA convention center that no one wants. Denver wants to borrow $1 billion to basically fund operations.

Neither party has any intention of repaying any of the $38 trillion, or care what it is spent on.

https://www.torched.la/why-this-convention-center-expert-is-...

I think Democrats have a logic for not paying it. This is an investment in people. If you want to start a business you raise money first thing and deliver in future. Government raised money, they'll invest it in development which will pay back in the future. Whether the process is efficient is a different debate.

I do not understand though, why Republicans talk about cutting spending, and then blow through the ceiling when they have the power.

> Neither party has any intention of repaying any of the $38 trillion

What are you talking about here? Federal debt is repaid on bond schedules fixed by statute. You can look it all up. You can argue about whether the debt load is too high, too low, whatever. But you can't just pretend they ran away with the money like a thief. People loaned the government that money because they know the government is good for it.

I think the point was, it doesn't look like it will ever be paid off entirely. It just grows, as do the payments.

That 38 trillion is 76 thousand dollars per person in the USA for instance. Pay that off? Really?

It’s highly unlikely there are 500,000,000 people living in America. The debt is $110,000+ per American and $327,000+ per taxpayer.

https://www.usdebtclock.org/

Uh... yes? That $76k is right about median household income, and a little under per capita GDP. Apply that logic to other sorts of finance: mortgage leverage is routinely five times that big, and no one freaks out about how you'll never be able to pay off your home.

Federal budget argumentation is just exhausting. Fight about balancing the budget, sure. Fight about unsustainable deficits, sure.

But to claim that very manageable federal debt payments can't be made is just ridiculous. Yes, the US government is going to pay off that debt. Which is why they were able to borrow it in the first place.

>Yes, the US government is going to pay off that debt. Which is why they were able to borrow it in the first place.

There may come a time when the interest on the debt becomes so out of control that it cannot be serviced, likely in conjunction with people dumping bonds and leaving interest rates soaring. Meaning, America's credit goes up in flames. We're obviously not there yet and maybe it will never happen. That said, remember when Trump backed off extreme levels of the "Liberation Day" tariffs? Real fears of bond-dumping seem to have a lot to do with the more measured (relatively-speaking) approach to tariffs we're now seeing. If debt holders dump the 10-year bonds enough, it causes real issues for debt repayment.

> If debt holders dump the 10-year bonds enough, it causes real issues for debt repayment.

No, it doesn't, it impacts future borrowing. Third time, before my blood pressure spikes: that is an argument about future debt. It being true (or not) has zero relevance to the current size of the debt. You could be right (or wrong) if we had zero outstanding debt, or if it was $70T.

Ergo, it's either an incorrect or bad faith analysis of the situation. The current debt (whatever its size happens to be in the fiction being spun) will be paid off at the bills' rates and on the statutory schedules. Period.

>The current debt (whatever its size happens to be in the fiction being spun) will be paid off at the bills' rates and on the statutory schedules. Period.

Your blood pressure issues notwithstanding, I don't think you believe that the US can possibly default or renege in any way on its debt, so there may not be a point in going on. History has run this experiment before and sovereign nations absolutely can default and/or renege on debt obligations. I certainly hope we don't see that in the case of the US. But I'm also not irrational enough to believe it's impossible.

Yeah, of course. But the argument is, at this future point, you must adjust policy to meet your obligations: either you can print more money, or you can cut services. But you must choose one or the other of those things.

The issue I think most people are correctly pointing out is that our current debt is unreasonable -- that it constrains our future policies way too much. Cutting services is effectively impossible in our politics, which leaves only inflation on the table. That's pretty much the same as default. That is where we're headed.

While I agree with the sentiment, a mortgage is collateralised by the house, usually even the starting point is at most 90-95% of the house value (so the loan is in fact over collateralised) and if any repaying took place along the way, even more so. Sure, it's not idiot proof. But government debt is surely mostly uncolalteralised?

The government can always repay by printing currency, but that's not the same. This is sort of a default too, since inflation eats away the artificially repaid debt.

So what actually happened is that Clinton said we had to get serious about the deficit, and then passed a budget that pushed the real cuts until after the end of Clinton's second term (that is, more than six years down the road).

Then Republicans took over the House in the midterms. They passed the budget (and Clinton signed it) that actually led to surplus for the first time since Andrew Jackson.

So, yes, it happened under a Democratic president. It only happened because of a Republican House, though.

(But let the president also be a Republican, and Republicans in Congress lose all fiscal discipline.)

A strong argument in favor of divided government.