I’m a young Canadian, so my knowledge of American politics is fleeting, but is this chart accurate???
And if it is accurate, is it somehow irrelavent due to the way we do business today? is it just an amplification due to inflation?
Sssshocking.
You bet your ass it’s correct.
Keep in mind that the deficit is only the decrease/increase in debt. The actual amount of debt is much more impressive.
Once you adjust that chart for inflation, however, it’s not quite as dramatic. See here for a few examples plotting deficit as % GDP or using inflation-adjusted dollars. In either case, it seems that recent years of deficit spending are still higher than most of recent history, but not orders of magnitude bigger.
Is that completely accurate re: the magnitude of the Clinton era surplus? I thought much of the surplus stemmed from some fancy accounting using the SS fund.
As a young Canadian you should go back and look at our federal deficit from the 60s to the 90s.
Without straying into GD territory, I think its fascinating that while Republicans almost universally decry democrats as “tax and spend”, there is clearly a reduction in deficit under Democratic presidents Carter and Clinton, and a huge increase of deficit spending under Republicans Reagan and Bush/Bush.
In fairness, much of this is due to the Congress being held by the opposing party… but its still a stark contrast, regardless.
I agree but with Reagan and GW Bush you had massive amounts of military spending.
Honestly, the biggest factor is the economy, not the party.
If you look for key recessions in that period and key growth periods, you can almost always match the trends to increases or decreases in the level of deficit/surplus spending. Clinton, in particular, had a whole run of strong economic growth that continued right up to 2001.
On the other hand, we have to admit that GW Bush managed to drown the good run from 2003-7 under two large, unfocused wars and Medicare part D.
Young Canadians might be surprised to discover that: Trudeau ran relatively modest deficits, the Conservatives under Mulroney blew the budget, as it appears Conservatives are wont to do, Chretien (and–to give credit where credit is due, Paul Martin) got the deficit under control and were running substantial surpluses, paying off, IIRC, 20 or 30% of the national debt (while the Conservatives were clamoring for tax relief). Until this year, the Conservatives were still having surpluses accomtanied by modest tax relief. Athough there is a lot to criticize the Conservatives for (for example, the near destruction of the CBC), their fiscal policies have been entirely reasonable. But it interesting to compare the fiscal trajectories of the US and Canada over the last forty years. Quite similar until W blew the budget this decade.
It is hard to recall that nine short years ago, there was a lot of discussion of how to deal with the budgetary surpluses in the US–reduce taxes or pay down the debt. Well that was resolved right quick.
To be fair, we were lucky. A fractured opposition that focused on debt and tax reduction allowed the Liberals to address the progressively skyrocketing deficit/GDP ratio. I’m not sure we would’ve done anything close to what we had to do if the Reform party hadn’t emerged and both shifted the fiscal discussion to the right, while effectively allowing the Liberals to make unpleasant choices since vote splitting on the right gave them both majorities and time. The worst effect of course was the new monomaniacal belief that taxes should never go up. That’s just dumb.
Thanks for pointing to the % of GDP chart, lazybratsche. It still paints an analogous picture. Little change during the 50s, 60s, and half of 70s, little change under democrats, and huge, unstoppable (not just a few years of exceptionally large magnitude, but in fact consecutive years through whole terms of office) under Reagan, Bush, and Bush.
I would not necessarily call those the “republican” years. One should be more narrow than that. It is more of a literal dynasty, not the representatives of half of America.
From Dynasty Definition & Meaning - Merriam-Webster, the literal definition of dynasty:
Obviously, no. You’re not seriously claiming 2 Bushes constitute a dynasty, are you?
As for “not the representatives of half of America”, remind me of how many Democratic presidents were elected with more than 50% of eligible voters.
Regan+Bush+Bush, they all shared many of the same staff and the same ideology. while not the literal sense of the word, I can certainly see a reason to use the word in this case.
What the hell does that mean? Not every eligible voter actually votes.
GWB claims to have been “elected” while his opponent actually got more votes.
I suspect much of the “deficit goes down substantially when a Democrat is President” talk will tend to be muted over the next three years.
Obama has been President since Jan 2009. The deficit for the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, 2009, is $1.42 trillion. The deficit for the year ending Sept. 30, 2008 was $459 billion. (Cite). The projected deficit for 2009 was $1.75 trillion. (Cite.)
Obama has claimed that he wants to reduce the deficit to or below 3% of GDP. This will require substantial spending cuts and/or tax increases over and above the tax increases required to pay for his health care reform initiative. (Cite).
Even the New York Times , which has made heroic efforts to blame all economic bad news on Bush, admits that Obama has no realistic plans to deal with the deficit (cite).
Regards,
Shodan
Money is the lubricant of politics. If you want to win, you spend money. If you want to be reelected, you spend your government’s money.
I’ve seen this with New Jersey under various Republican and Democratic governors. Democratic governor Florio raised taxes and cut spending to reduce the New Jersey state deficit because of the spending done by the previous Governor, Republican Kean.
Of course, that made Florio really popular, and he was defeated by Republican Whitman. Whitman cut taxes, but did it by borrowing massive amounts of money from the state pension fund. She claimed that because of New Jersey’s good credit rating (thanks to the previous incumbent’s tax increases and budget cutting), it would be cheaper for New Jersey to borrow the money than to put money into the pension fund.
After she resigned, Donald DiFrancesco raised state pensions in order to get the state employees unions to support him.
Democrat McGreevey (after three intervening acting governors in a 15 day period) was a typical machine politician (well, maybe not so typical) and did all sorts of budget tricks to avoid tackling the budget. He’d probably would have won reelection if it wasn’t for the political money scandal that caused him to admit he was a closeted homosexual and resign, thus taking the heat off of the other scandals he was involved in.
Democrat Corzine was next (after a few month stretch from Democrat Cody as acting governor) and tried to tackle the budget issues, but didn’t have the political sense to do it. Now, we’ll have Republican Christie, and we’ll see how well he’ll do. I take it he’ll do some cutting of some minor welfare programs to prove he’s a budget hawk, but won’t touch the hard stuff: The ridiculous amount of money the State of New Jersey funnels to the over 640 municipalities in the name of Property Tax Relief.
If someone was actually serious about balancing the budget in New Jersey, they’d trim down the number of independent municipalities by drastically cutting the amount of money the state gives to municipalities until they form more coherent communities. About 1/2 of the municipalities in New Jersey have no commercial property for property tax. You have cities like Teterboro with 15 people, and Shrewsbury Township that consists of five apartment complexes.
But that would involve tackling Home Rule which is extremely popular – especially by politicians who can use the various offices created by boro-itis (the massive number of localities in New Jersy). Every city has a council, fire department, police department, school board (even when there are no schools), etc. That’s a lot of political jobs!
Moved to GD.
I think such talk is wrong in the first place. Democrats are sometimes up, sometimes down, with good years and bad. They don’t always bring down the deficit. But it is still in contrast with Reagan, Bush, Bush who had massive deficits every single year.
Of course, Obama is apparently a secret heir to the Bush dynasty (with the way he’s been defending all of their policies), so we’ll see what will happen. Certainly the stimulus bill puts him off to a good start.