Who Wants to Play Deficit Bingo?
Take a look at the graph below. It's a quick summary of deficit spending by President as a percentage of GDP since 1940. Go ahead, take a look, we'll talk about it afterward, I promise.
Okay, so you notice that we went from about 50% to 120% between 1940 and 1946? That's because we were busy whippin' Nazi and Japanese behind, and frankly, if we didn't run up the debt, we would all be Sieg Heiling for real, Mr. Beck.
Now, notice another fact that will drive some of you crazy: from 1946 to 1981, we were actually driving down the deficit in a steady fashion. It was Mr. Reagan, patron saint of all right-wing Republicans, who started to ramp up peace-time deficits. Some would argue that he had to do that to topple the Soviet Union, but frankly, they were pretty much on their last legs anyway.
Notice too that in between the Reagan/Bush I and Bush II deficit orgies was Clinton, who was at least bending the curve down on this whole deficit thing. Bush II took all those budget surpluses and started racking up the debt again with the spending, the tax cuts, and the wars, essentially doubling our national debt to 12 trillion dollars. (Who says your tax dollars aren' hard at work?)
In effect, when Obama was sworn in, we hit the 80% mark and just kept climbing (remember that the first year of a president's budget is actually still nominally under the control of the previous president, so all of 2009 were really Bush bucks coming out of your pocket). We're now at the 87% mark or thereabouts, putting us at the same levels historically as the Truman administration (Korean War, McCarthyism, ouch sounds familiar).
Okay, fine, what's my point? Well, both parties are pretty much complicit in this deficit game. So if you somehow think Obama is the only one who has run up the deficit, you're 100% wrong--the world's been burning long before he showed up. Also, if you think Republicans really care about the deficit, may I remind you of Cheney hitting all the Sunday talk shows just a few years ago saying "Deficits don't matter."
Continued on the next page
Follow Technorati