I've just recently started reading
Andrew Tobias's blog on a daily basis, and I highly recommend it. Today's entry,
Would You Filch Your Daughter's College Fund?, was an elegant analogy illustrating the problem with continuous, long-term deficit spending. I forwarded a link to a couple of friends of mine, along with my comments.
One of my friends, a die-hard Republican, responded with the Democrats-can't-be-trusted-with-your-hard-earned-money meme, which led me to do a little research. I thought I'd share my reply with all of you, as I'm sure I'm not the only one who will encounter this erroneous meme.
My comments on Tobias's
Would You Filch Your Daughter's College Fund?:
The party of fiscal responsibility is clearly the Democratic Party, whereas the Republican Party has had 25 years to clearly establish itself as the "tax-cut and spend" party. Just a matter of time before the smoke-and-mirrors rhetoric machine breaks down and the true nature of Republican fiscal idiocy becomes commonly known.
To which my (generally reasonable, but still quite doctrinaire) Republican friend replied:
Congress has control of the purse strings, not the President. Republicans have had control of Congress since 1994, and for most of that period, the budget was balanced. Only when the economy and war broke out has this congress seemed to have lost its mind. Please look long and hard at the fiscal irresponsibility shown by the Democrat controlled congress from 1956 to 1994. That period included boom and bust economies, and war and peace. I will agree that this Congress needs to start cutting programs, but I will never agree that the Democrats are the party of fiscal responsibility.
But history is on our side, and numbers don't lie. Well they can, actually, but it's pretty darn unlikely when the President's OMB publishes the very numbers that demonstrate his own party's profligacy. Granted, it's on a macroeconomic scale, but the bottom line is the bottom line. And the bottom line is that Democrats pay their own way, but Republicans can't help but go nuts on Daddy's credit card.
My reply:
Presidents have no control over the budget then? That's a new one.
Detailed budget requests from the executive branch are the necessary starting point for Congress' role. Or are you suggesting that budgets and appropriations bills spring forth fully formed from the minds of congressional committee members?
The correct answer is that both the President and Congress are responsible for the budget. But one is clearly more influential than the other, and I'll give you a hint: it ain't Congress.
Democratic President + Democratic Congress = modest deficits: Carter's budgets resulted in deficits ranging from $41.6 billion in FY 1978 to $69.2 billion in FY 1981, with a low point of $25.9 billion in FY 1979.
Republican President + Democratic or Mixed Congress = big deficits: Reagan's budgets resulted in deficits ranging from $128.5 billion in FY 1983 to a low of $127.4 billion in FY 1989, with a high of $207.5 billion in FY 1983; Bush I's budgets resulted in deficits ranging from a low of $211.5 billion in FY 1990 to $256.9 billion in FY 1993, with a high of $291.7 billion in FY 1992.
Democratic President + Democratic Congress again = shrinking deficits: Clinton's first two budgets resulted in deficits of $192.2 billion in FY 1994 and $154.6 billion in FY 1995.
Democratic President + Republican or Mixed Congress = rapidly shrinking deficits and a growing surplus: Clinton's remaining budgets resulted in deficits ranging from an $83.2 billion deficit in FY 1996 to a $154.4 billion surplus in FY 2001, with a high water mark of $291.4 billion surplus in FY 2000.
Republican President + Mixed Congress = a quick about face and rapidly growing record deficits: Bush II's first two budgets erased the growing surplus and resulted in deficits of $161.7 billion in FY 2002 and $386.9 billion in FY 2003.
Republican President + Republican Congress = worse yet: Bush II's next two budgets project to result in deficits of $412 billion in FY 2004 and $427 billion in FY 2005 (well on the way to cutting the deficit in half by 2009 I might add, sarcastically of course).
That's the modern era in a nutshell. Clearly, as far as balancing the budget goes, it doesn't matter who controls Congress (that's not the same as controlling spending, I might point out -- Dems may spend more, but they tend to pay for it with corresponding revenue hikes rather than just borrowing the whole thing). What does matter is who is in the White House.
BTW, the trends hold even when you exclude off-budget surpluses. Moreover, the current deficit looks astonishingly bad when you do that.
Prior years show modest surpluses and deficits for presidents and congresses of both parties, even in times of war and economic downturn. Only the 1970s economic "malaise" was associated with recurring deficits. From 1956 through Nixon (FY 1958 through FY 1974) the budget was in sound shape with both parties in the White House. Under Ford and Carter, deficits jumped up to the $40-70 billion dollar range, numbers which appear to apply without partisan preference, and which pale in comparison to later deficits rung up by Reagan and the two Bushes.
So there.
Sources: Office of Management and Budget, Budget of the United States Government: Fiscal Year 2005, Historical Tables, tbl. 15.6; Jonathan Weisman, Record '05 Deficit Forecast, The Washington Post, Jan. 26, 2005, at A-1.
Unfortunately, as one of my liberal friend says, "facts don't hold much water in today's discourse." Nevertheless, I prefer to be grounded in objective data, rather than empty platitudes.