Dem vs. GOP presidents & national debt chart

[yurbud]

http://www.lafn.org/politics/gvdc/Natl_Debt_Chart.html">Link to sources

[Drunken Irishman]

1. Of course, Republicans always state it was the Dems who ran up spending in the 80s.

And the Republicans were the ones who lowered spending in the 90s.

[RuleOfNah]

2. A classic chart!

Got any for corporate crime? Republican convicts?

[Lasher]

3. Increases in the national debt vs. deficits

Deficits are annual increases in the national debt. But deficits cited by the White House only include borrowing from entities outside the United States Government. They do not include borrowing by the general fund from other governmental agencies such as the Social Security trust fund. Increases in the national debt reflected in this chart are more accurate because they account for all borrowing.

http://zfacts.com/p/519.html

Total debt held by the public currently stands at just over $5 trillion and intragovernmental holdings amount to $4 trillion.

http://www.treasurydirect.gov/NP/BPDLogin?application=np

[Rageneau]

4. Charts like these ought to be on billboards nationwide.

[alofarabia]

5. Please be very, very careful...

with this. Presidents can only sign or veto spending bills that are voted through Congress. If you replace the party of the president with the party controling Congress (if one party has both the House and the Senate) the results are somewhat different. 2002-present is of course due to an unnecessary and expensive war, but the rest of the time period on the chart is problematic. I would argue that during the Reagan years that taxes should have been raised on the wealthy to avoid/reduce the deficit in those years.

[Lasher]

8. 2002-present deficits are not primarily due to the war in Iraq.

Even though we've wasted about $100 billion a year on the war in Iraq, the cost of the tax cuts for the wealthy far outweighs the cost of the war.

[radfringe]

6. president party affiliation only 1/2 the equation... need to consider congress

(at the risk of being flamed, accused of being a troll, freeper or other disruptive element)

I'll try to google out the link - but here goes:

historically Best - worst economy (1 being best 4 being worst)

1. Democratic President - republic congress
2. republic president - Democratic congress
3. Democratic President - Democratic congress
4. republic president - republic congress

[Lasher]

7. I would be very interested in seeing that information source.

One thing I'm wondering is how you would categorize the congress during Saint Ronnie's first 6 years, when Republicans controlled the Senate and Democrats controlled the House.

And such a breakdown might only serve to muddy the water. For example, every single Republican in Congress voted against the The Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993 and it was barely passed by the Democratic congress with Vice President Al Gore casting the tie breaking vote in the Senate. This key legislation would certainly not have been passed by the Republicans who took control of Congress in 1994, so it doesn't seem logical to give them credit for the shrinking deficits that occurred during Clinton's presidency.

After 1993 Clinton would have vetoed any attempt by the Republican congress to rescind key elements of the Act, notably the tax increase on the top 2%. But with Clinton out of the way, they wasted no time in 2001, massively cutting taxes on the wealthy and throwing pay/go out the window. The result is there in the OP's chart for all to see.

[radfringe]

9. here ya go... and my memory was off a bit DEM-DEM is the best for economic growht

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_05/006282.php

May 9, 2005
REPUBLICANS vs. DEMOCRATS ON THE ECONOMY....Did you know that Democratic presidents are better for the economy than Republicans? Sure you did. I pointed this out two years ago, back when my readership numbered in the dozens, and more recently Michael Kinsley ran the numbers in the LA Times and came to the same conclusion.

The results are simple: Democratic presidents have consistently higher economic growth and consistently lower unemployment than Republican presidents. If you add in a time lag, you get the same result. If you eliminate the best and worst presidents, you get the same result. If you take a look at other economic indicators, you get the same result. There's just no way around it: Democratic administrations are better for the economy than Republican administrations.

Skeptics offer two arguments: first, that presidents don't control the economy; second, that there are too few data points to draw any firm conclusions. Neither argument is convincing. It's true that presidents don't control the economy, but they do influence it — as everyone tacitly acknowledges by fighting like crazed banshees over every facet of fiscal policy ever offered up by a president.

The second argument doesn't hold water either. The dataset that delivers these results now covers more than 50 years, 10 administrations, and half a dozen different measures. That's a fair amount of data, and the results are awesomely consistent: Democrats do better no matter what you measure, how you measure it, or how you fiddle with the data.

But it turns out there's more to this. Via Brendan Nyhan, I recently read a paper by Princeton's Larry Bartels that adds some fascinating details to this picture.

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http://www.rtorgerson.blogspot.com/2004_06_01_archive.html
Sunday, June 06, 2004
If You Want to Live Like A Republican, Vote Democratic (part II)

In a recent blog I laid out the fact that economic growth under Democratic Party controlled administrations is significantly higher than under Republican administrations, at least for the last 52 years. Further, the highest average growth rates have occurred under Federal governments with a Democratic President and a House of Representatives controlled by Democrats.
(Budget/finance bills originate in the House, not the Senate, by order of the US Constitution. So Party control of the House is much more important on economic issues.) Well, 2003 data has been added to the mix, so we now have 53 years of data to look at. We've had 17 years where we had a Democratic President working with a Democratic House. In those years, inflation-adjusted real GDP growth averaged 4.5% per year. In the 6 years when a Democratic President had to contend with a GOP run House, GDP growth averaged 3.9%. In the 26 years when we had a Republican President and a Democratic House, GDP growth averaged 3.0%. Finally, in the five years when the Republicans controlled both the House and the White House, GDP growth was a tepid 2.1%.

[Lasher]

11. Mighty fine, radfringe!

Here is the article by Michael Kinsley, which is mentioned at the beginning of the first article you shared:

Our text today is the statistical tables of the 2005 Economic Report of the President. I did this exercise a while back with the 2004 tables and couldn't quite believe the results. But the 2005 data confirm it: The party with the best record of serving Republican economic values is the Democrats. It isn't even close.

The Republican values I refer to are universal. We all want prosperity, oppose unemployment, dislike inflation, don't enjoy paying taxes, etc. These values are Republican only in the sense that Republicans are supposed to treasure them more and to be more reluctant to sacrifice them for other goals such as equality and clean air

Statistics back to 1959 make this clear. A consistent pattern over 45 years cannot be explained by shorter-term factors, such as war or who controls Congress. Maybe presidents can't affect the economy much, but the assumption that they can and do is so prominent in Republican rhetoric that they are stuck with it.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20059-2005Apr1.html

And to bolster our conclusion that the economy does better with Democrats controlling both the Executive and Legislative branches, please consider this:



This chart shows federal spending as percent of GDP, sorted highest spending percent. Party leadership is at bottom. Blue is Democrat; orange is Republican. Top row is President; middle is House; Bottom is Senate. The top ten spending years - across three different Presidential administrations have been Republican years in the White House -- seven of them with Republican Senates (tempering the counter argument that spending is something Congress does that the White House can't stop.)



And with low taxes and high spending, the deficit has been a disaster under the Republicans. Fourteen of the fifteen worst deficits in recent history have been under Republican Presidents, the lone Democrat entry on that list was Clinton's FY 93 budget that was pretty much inherited from the GWB administration (none of the top 14 Republican Presidential deficits were immediately inherited from a Democrat.)

The Republicans do a great PR job of labeling Democrats as "tax and spend", but only the "tax" part of the label has any potential legitimacy. Spending - and spending when there is no cash in the bank to pay for it - has been a Republican trait for quite some time now.

http://thereadersbrigade.blogspot.com/2007/10/those-tax-and-spend-republicans.html

More charts here:

http://traxel.com/deficit/

[malaise]

10. Damn!!

Error: you can only recommend threads which were started in the past 24 hours

Maw: "Our fiscally conservative Rethugs are keeping you safe from terraists and that's not cheap...he he he"!

:sarcasm: