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Does anyone else notice a pattern?
Here’s how the debt has fared under Presidents of the past 30 years:
Jimmy Carter (D) -3.2%
Ronald Reagan (R) +11.3%
Ronald Reagan (R) +9.2%
George H. W. Bush (R) +13.1%
Bill Clinton (D) -0.6%
Bill Clinton (D) -8.2%
George W. Bush (R) +6.9%
George W. Bush (R) +3.9% projection
A clear pattern of increasing debt under Republicans and decreasing debt under Dems.
The debt has gone up $4 TRILLION under Bush/McCain — a 71.9% increase. Biggest increase in U.S. History. The bailout/rescue bill raises the National Debt Limit for the 7th time under Bush.
This massive, crippling debt is not exactly what the Bush Admin was selling to the American people. Check out this remarkable statement from Bush’s "Blueprint for New Beginnings" (Feb 2001):
Indeed, the President’s Budget pays down the debt so aggressively that it runs into an unusual problem—its annual surpluses begin to outstrip the amount of maturing debt starting in 2007.
Annual surpluses! That worked out real well.
So what’s McCain’s plan?
A dangerous government-wide spending freeze.
…he offered few details, other than to reiterate his call for a “one-year spending freeze on every agency of the federal government, excepting only national defense, the care of our veterans, and a few critical priorities.’’ He called it a spending “pause” when he first proposed it in April.
And, although independent fiscal analysts said that Mr. McCain’s tax cut proposals would make it virtually impossible to balance the budget even before the fiscal crisis hit and the bailout was proposed, he said, “I am committed to billions in spending reductions that will balance the budget, and get us on the path away from ruinous debt.”
The only question remains… Why do Republicans LOVE debt?
11 Comments
Wow. Those are some telling statistics.
I guess Republicans aren’t “tax and spend,” they’re just “spend and spend.”
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Thanks, Ethan.
Seconding Jane!
Cheney says deficits don’t matter – we’ll let dems figure it out and take the blame.
McCain is maverick only in his shoot from the hip style which I find alarming. a spending freeze? did he just think that up like the gas tax holiday? does he have a little deck of cards of creative ideas that he shuffles and pulls one out and says “oh, let’s run that up the flag pole”.
Thank you for those statistics. I’m still a fan of reality.
They profit from the debt.
Let’s see…putting on visor and pulling adding machine crank handle…
$4 Trillion divided by 300 Million = $13,333 for Every Man, Woman and Child in America!
How does it Feel to be a Bush Debt Mule, America?
Great Work, Ethan!
Ever heard of Grover Norquist?
Since a lot of fundies believe the rapture is coming soon, I don’t know that they care.
Oh yah May. I’m familiar with Mr. “Drown It In The Bathtub.”
That was my first sentiment when they started throwing around the idea of a bailout. “They” got what they wanted. This is what they’ve been waiting for, for years.
I’m also thinking that this current crisis is a book-end of the Enron scandal — especially since Phil Gramm is at the center of both. I just find it unbelievably coincidental that Enron happened at the very very beginning of Bush’s first term and the credit crisis at the very very end.
It’s almost as if they planned it out that way to allow them to get away with hoisting billions of dollars from the American tax payers while attempting to shift the blame to the Dems. Disgusting.
It is ironic that the great capitalistic stalwarts governed during the time of irresponsible financial stewardship.Ethan’s analysis is helpful but it would be more enlightening to see a “sources and uses” analysis…..i.e. who benefited most from the increased debt……I wonder if it was Haliburton?
And the most disgusting part is it worked. The RNC will have ads blaming Obama and the Dems for the bailout PDQ, “You betcha!”
There’s a book called “Sleep walking through History” that describes the Conservative tactic regarding over spending. In Reagan’s years they concluded that even many Republicans were adverse to cutting spending. The conservative goal was to reduce the size of Government. Why?,so free enterprise(code for multinational greedy bastard) could win.
Failing to rain in spending they decided that draining the treasury could do it even if it meant that taxes couldn’t support a goddamn thing than over than the interest. They simply wanted help the rest of us by defanging the epa, the social security, medicare, etc, and other things that stood in the way of their wealthy big businesses supporters.