The right does typically spend more than the left and put us further into the hole. That said, Obama certainly didn't feel restrained on the left. Worse, Trump is not really the right, for better or worse, in his own wacked out way, he has found the new center, but he has a lot of lefty tendencies along with his new found right tendencies. I suspect he is going to spend like a drunken sailor who buddied up with both GWB and Obama. Despite citing the deficit, neither candidate mentioned any plans to try and balance the budget and pay it off. I think the last candidate to talk about that, and shockingly do something about it, was Bill.
Will see. When Obama took office, I had my fingers crossed and was hoping for good things. For me, a lot of his presidency was disappointing, but he did 2 things that were valuable. 1) he brought the country back in from the financial collapse at the tail end of GWB's presidency, and 2) he took out osama. With regard to 1) it's tough to know, was it really that bad, could someone else have done it better, so much monday quarterbacking, could it have been done without bailouts, could it have been done by spending less and putting us less in debt— but it was pretty starkly bad at the time, and, subjectively, I felt it could have turned out a lot worse. But who knows.
Similarly with Trump I'm trying to stay hopeful. Doing that with this schizophrenic goal. Trying not to listen to his rhetoric but follow his actions, as his rhetoric can make me nuts. Second, if he proposes stuff that tries to trample any of our citizens rights, particularly our civil rights, to stand up in solidarity with whatever group might be marginalized by it. I am a big believer that united, everyone is stronger. There have been a lot of slippery slopes all in the name of some good cause that we end up paying too high a price for later. And so with this new President, I'm being particularly weary as I think his potential for steepening the slopes is high. Hopefully he surprises us all in good ways and can also get some much needed things done.
The infrastructure in the US is now abysmal and needs some real help—I remember in NYC he ended up taking over the building of an ice skating rink that the gov couldn't finish for like 5 years and spending like 10mil, Koch got trump and trump finished it in 4 months for under $3mill (faster and cheaper than contracted for). Of course that was a long time ago, but hopefully some of that acumen can be pointed at much needed infrastructure improvements. It took us 15 years to rebuild the trade center, which is shameful, not resilient, and we crazy overspent on that. The 2nd ave subway line started in the late 60s! Started and stopped a bunch. It started up again about 10 years ago. Crazy overspending on it in the billions. It probably won't be done for another decade. To give a sense of scale, many segments of the subway were built by private industry as early as 1900 and a lot in the 30s and 40s, with horrible equipment and conditions, in the span of 3 and 4 years for major segment lines. They certainly did more with less. Our roads are built to disintegrate on purpose for make work projects, so that workers can be constantly rebuilding them. If you look to germany, which has far harsher climate conditions, their roads are amazing because the initial build out is of much higher quality, so they need less repair. TLDR there is so much to do on infrastructure, that hopefully trump can do some good there.
Anyway, I've been saying this for a long time. The stupid nature of the american election system, I fear no good person wants this job anymore. I fear the last election has borne that out a bit. That said, I'm still hopeful for good things, yet ready to fight like hell if/when I see bad things pop up.
As always, YMMV.