The big lies (2)

You see, some folks must be under the impression that as long as something is repeated often enough, it will become true. Paul Krugman

One of the touchstones of many Republican voters is that the Republicans are "the party of fiscal responsibility." Nothing could be further from the truth. Neither party has been a paragon of financial discipline, as an examination of the trend of our national debt shows.

[All data comes from the Bush Administration's the 2003 Budget Historical Background. For larger images of this or any of the following images, simply click on the image.]

More informative than this cumulative graph is a breakdown of how nuch each administration contributed to the deficit. For example, here is a plot of the deficit by year since 1940, again in constant dollars.

Dwight Meredith writes in PLA ("A Journal of Politics, Law and Autism") and has additionally provided an analysis of budget deficits and party control of the White House from 1962 to 2002.

The net result:

The twenty years of budgets prepared by Republican presidents increased the national debt by $3.8 trillion. The average yearly deficit under Republican budgets was $190 billion.

The twenty years of budgets prepared by Democratic presidents increased the national debt by $719.5 billion. The average yearly deficit under Democratic budgets was $36 billion.

The difference is astounding. Of the Federal debt incurred since 1962, 84% is attributable to GOP fiscal policies. The result of all this debt is that more than 25% of our current budget goes to interest payments, which, to put it another way, cost each American more than $1200 a year in additional income taxes (not counting Medicare and Social Security taxes).

This is the legacy of the "party of fiscal responsibility." Consider that Bush has already squandered the surpluses bequeathed us by Clinton's management of the economy and is on track to record deficits in the next 7 years. Think of this next time you step inside the polling booth.

My reader may object that the ostensible control of the purse lies with Congress since all spending bills must originate in the House of Representatives. In fact, this is absurd. The President's budget is dutifully introduced in the House by members of his party. Further, the actual budget, as passed by Congress, rarely differs as much as 4% from that proposed by the administration. So, use of the actual budget is more clearly a reflection of the current administrstion's fiscal policy and spending priorities.

Some may object to the use of dollars as a measure, although these data are normalized to 1996 dollars and use the inflation adjustments of the Bush Administration. The data are also presented in terms of GDP below. This type of analysis is misleading. It is often used by Republican apologists as it serves to normalize the numbers and make them appear smaller. It also shows the large debts, relative to GDP, needed to fund WW2, but minimizes the Reagan looting of the budget as GDP was much larger in the 1980's. But most importantly, we don't pay the debts back the "GDPs" but in dollars.

Posted by Gordon at December 01, 2002 05:16 PM | E-mail Author | Back to main page