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Commentary By Brian Riedl

Trump Added More to the National Debt Than Obama and Bush

Economics Tax & Budget

Donald Trump’s final tab is in. Legislation and executive actions signed by former President Trump added $7.8 trillion in ten-year budget deficits. When accounting for non-legislative budget savings, the total projected budget deficits expanded by $3.9 trillion over the decade.

These figures appear in my new report, “Trump’s Fiscal Legacy: A Comprehensive Overview of Spending, Taxes, and Deficits” which analyzes Congressional Budget Office data.

It begins with the ten-year (2017-2027) budget baseline that Trump inherited in January 2017, and then measures all subsequent changes to those ten-year estimates that occurred during his presidency. This includes aggregating every line-item of every bill he signed, as well as the deficit shifts driven by economic changes and the Congressional Budget Office’s technical re-estimates of existing tax-and-spending policies.

Continue reading the entire piece here at the The Daily Beast

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Brian M. Riedl is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on Twitter here

This piece originally appeared in The Daily Beast