That's not true. Bill Clinton both slightly raised taxes and significantly lowered spending in relative terms, balancing the budget in the process.

This ignores history. We did raise taxes in the 90s and were paying off our debt. Bush senior made the big boy decision and it left us in amazing shape. Clinton handed over a government to W that was paying off debts and had surplus from 1998-2001.

The US had a balanced budget in 2001, after decades of most people claiming that was impossible. The problem with a balanced budget is we all have to live in the real world. The actual real world that you can measure, not each individual's theoretical world of choice.

But stories are much more fun than data, and we put everything on the credit card, and here we are.

But cutting taxes has also resulted in more spending.

All sibling comments are untrue, because it is the legislative branch that has the "power of the purse", including the ability to raise/lower taxes and pass budgets for spending.

So whether an executive makes campaign promises, takes credit for signing the bills into law, or championing the bills and advocating that Congress pass them, it is ultimately Congress--the House with the Senate--that has done these things with taxes and the budget.

Thanks for sharing your opinion. The first difficulty in real world (even idealized) politics is voicing a consistent independent stance and thinking through the implications. Many cannot even make it that far.

The second and greater difficulty is that realizing that a solution that is politically untenable is not a solution, it's a campaign slogan. I don't know how we get people to move past this difficulty.

I'm an American with a few horses in this race, and I also want to raise taxes to get rid of billionaires and provide more money to the government.

I'd prefer to use that money for "progressive" things like schools and libraries and parks (voted in 2024 to increase my own taxes on those things specifically, but my neighbors voted against them), but I'd even settle for spending it on the military if it came out of the pockets of the oligarchs to reduce inequality.

> Taxing the wealthy is the most popular way to lower the debt.

Let me clarify: Few in the mainstream of current politics and media want to discuss higher taxes on the uber wealthy (1B and up) - much less the very wealthy (100M and up).

It's only happening in a few places at the state and local level, but that's challenging because of the ability of the wealthy to move residence between states (something the pied a terre tax cleverly works around).

It also seems to have a lot more purchase these days in forums like this. My comment above about raising taxes would likely have received much more opposition 10 years ago. It seems like the consciousness here has shifted, probably because many here have a front row seat to the emergence of the tech oligarchy.

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> Ever since 1970s, money has been a figment of imaginations

Money has always been a social construct. There is no fundamental particle of currency.