President Obama enters the twilight of his presidency with falling deficits.
President Obama enters the twilight of his presidency with falling deficits. Pete Souza/www.whitehouse.gov

The one thing you will not hear during the GOP "debate" is that the US debt has not grown this year. Indeed, it has fallen as much as it has risen within a narrow band. On top of that, Obama has actually done what the Bushes and Reagan failed to do, which is reduce government. Also, the budget deficit is falling significantly.

Most people will not remember this, nor will it be mentioned during the GOP debate, but Bush left Obama with a federal deficit of $1.4 trillion and a crashed financial system. Now, the Congressional Budget Office is estimating that the federal deficit for 2015 "will fall to $426 billion." (It was $483 billion in 2014. By the way, over the past two years, Obama's requested deficit has been much higher than the actual deficit.)

However, it's unlikely that Obama will leave office with a budget surplus. That would take much more than revenue generated from economic expansion and increased corporate tax receipts from profits, but also a sharp increase in the marginal tax rate on the rich. And this class—the rich—has so much political power that it can pay a major political party to devote much of its energy pushing the idea that cutting taxes will improve the economy, when, of course, the opposite is true. The last time the economy grew at something like 4 percent was when the marginal tax rate on the rich was between 70 and 90 percent (today it is 35 percent).

Jeb Bush, however, continues to claim that his economic plan can make the economy grow at 4 percent. No one really believes that is possible. The United States did not grow that fast even during the Reagan and the Clinton years (and the latter left the White House with a budget surplus). And with all the tax cuts that Jeb's brother gave to the rich, he did not achieve that kind of growth. (And that, by the way, is how Jeb promises he will reach 4 percent growth: cutting taxes.)

But if you cut taxes, won't that send the public debt north again? Yes, it most likely will. But that's fine because the United States actually sells its debt to the rich, who prefer loaning money to the public than having it taken from them for things like transportation and education.