But we were set to pay off the nation debt by 2013 before Bush tax cuts. Bush’s tarp, Trump tax cuts plus Covid were the other nails in the coffin of debt reduction.
Starve the beast has been an official Republican strategy for 40 years.
It went way, way up during WWII and hasn't changed much since. And that's relative to GDP over a period that real GDP per capita increased significantly, i.e. government revenue in real dollars per capita is through the roof.
The US tax system has an evolved defect where the tax brackets are set in nominal dollars and then as inflation pushes everyone into the next highest bracket Congress periodically gets to claim credit for passing a "tax cut" without actually reducing the level of real government revenue -- indeed it has been going up enough to keep up with real GDP growth. And if you confuse that with an actual tax cut then you can write articles where "without the tax cut" there would be more revenue, but only because there is an implicit continuous tax increase baked into the tax code to allow Congress to repeatedly tell everyone that up is down.
It's not a revenue problem. Revenue is up. It's a spending problem.
But we were set to pay off the nation debt by 2013 before Bush tax cuts. Bush’s tarp, Trump tax cuts plus Covid were the other nails in the coffin of debt reduction.
Starve the beast has been an official Republican strategy for 40 years.