There’s been much ado of late about who is to blame for our national debt. To hear Republicans talk, Obama is at fault for every penny, while Democrats, less forcefully, blame it on Republicans. Of course, I knew that both parties were responsible and believed that Republicans were to a much greater extent than Democrats. Yesterday I was listening to the Fred and Jed Show and heard Margaret Meyer express the same view. So I decided to do a little digging and prepared a spreadsheet on how much each administration in my lifetime increased the national debt. Here are those numbers.
Increase in National Debt
Republicans
Democrats
President
$Trillions
President
$Trillions
Eisenhower
$0.01
Kennedy/Johnson
$0.03
Eisenhower
$0.02
Johnson
$0.04
Nixon
$0.10
Carter
$0.29
Nixon/Ford
$0.24
Clinton
$1.02
Reagan
$0.82
Clinton
$0.40
Reagan
$1.05
Obama
$1.65
GHW Bush
$1.48
GW Bush
$2.14
GW Bush
$3.97
Total
$9.83
$3.43
Avg/Term
$1.09
$0.57
Data source: CBO
This is raw data, not indexed or adjusted. Unlike Republican, the numbers do not lie. They apportion the blame fairly.
10 Responses to “Debt: Unlike Republicans, the Numbers Don’t Lie”
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Smaller less intrusive government is very expensive. I thought everyone knew that?
I am confused. I thought Clinton received a debt from Bush I, and eliminated it. Have I been getting bad info, or is my mind deteriorating faster than previously thought?
Putting aside the significant difference between “debt” and “deficit” – IIRC, the major point is that Clinton only had a “budget surplus” three of his eight years. The last two were the ones that handed Bush a surplus. But overall, Clinton didn’t have a “surplus”
(I’ll try to dig for some sources later on – off to brunch w/ friends)
Not to “wonk” a dead horse, but Clinton did have a surplus of $69 billion in FY1998, $123 billion in FY1999 and $230 billion in FY2000 . And so was able to claim that the national debt had been reduced by $360 billion in his last three years.
http://archives.cnn.com/2000/ALLPOLITICS/stories/09/27/clinton.surplus/
But over his entire eight years, the deficit did go up.
PS: The raw numbers in TC’s chart from the CBO look the same as from the link below, and may be more easily viewed:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_debt_by_U.S._presidential_terms
I ran the numbers, too and I’m in agreement with the chart. It’s pretty striking, to me, that “W” had six trillion of it. 👿 He’s the one that the t-bagers need to be upset about. 👿
That’s because he put 2 wars and a financial crisis (which the Repubs STILL blame on Obama even though he was just elected and not president yet (but Bush checked out about 6 months before that) on the old Chinese credit card, i.e., off the books. When Obama became president, he put them on the books so everyone could see how much we spent on the wars because if you noticed, the entire time Bush was president, he never mentioned how much these wars cost us. He couldn’t because then he’d have to put them on the books then 😡 and he didn’t want the American people knowing what he was spending. Oh and the tax cuts for the rich also went on the Chinese credit card.
I’ll trust numbers over RepublicanTs and Tea-baggers any day of the week.
We all know how “liberal” the CBO is, right? 🙂 And everybody knows Republican Party debt is good and necessary while Democratic Party debt is evil socialism… BIG difference.
Great interview with Fred and Jed, BTW! I may be next in their “Interview with a blogger”series. You set the bar at an impressive level, my friend.
People have learnt to adopt words that are not so repulsive. Once proudly spelt out the word ‘capitalist’ is out of flavor because it has a ‘corrupt’ connotation to it. So a capitalist these days call themselves progressives, which has nothing to do to becoming or being progressive. The same old bad attitude just a different name. They may change the definition of progressive to explain who they are, but that is insidious.
The other words or phrases used are ‘big government’, ‘small government’ Here again there is malicious manipulation in mind. They want to shut down practically all the government and the government departments so that everything is privatized subsequently there are no rules and regulations to worry about, the only rules would be the day-to-day rules to suit their needs making them the legal authority. Seems like an evil plan. cannot work in the long run.
Imagine your social security check in the hands of thugs. Your medicare controlled by thugs. Teachers and fireman cannot have rights because there is no union or a fair union agreement for fair pay or fair working conditions. Besides your 35 year old pension many be abused by private company that will use the money deposited as a trust to be invested where there may be greater risk for profit as well as greater risks for losses. What can be more lucrative than ‘playing with other people’s money’ Be ready to accept job for the sweat shop. Or are you really angry to say that this is un-thinkable, it should be stopped. Next, Big government pulverized to small government would mean the same thing; back to the Enron Era and the World Com debacle. We will see Earnie Madoff control the private sector from behind the bars. No rules and regulation, no Sarbanes-Oxley Act to be accountable for any transactions. You can take this seriously or you can take this as a total lie, (half of me is already 3 feet under, 3 more and I will make it to the 6 feet mark) the choice is yours.
Sarbanes Oxley, created to prevent the fraud that happened at Enron is a complete waste now; it’s been totally de-fanged by the financial auditors at public accounting firms. And this is why – they are only testing financial controls and not the computer systems that produce the numbers. They are not testing the operational controls which lead into the financial statements at all. If the operational controls, including manual and system controls are not tested, and they feed into the financial statements, it becomes easier to input or commit fraud into the operational controls that feed the financials and some IT departments are not the best and the brightest; at one client, pretty much everything was a mess. Since they don’t test the operational controls nor the system controls on either operations or financials (they consider it a big box that just adds stuff up), it’s a completely worthless exercise. Anyone can’t plant fraud into an operational control and it would never be caught.
In the 80’s when I first started auditing, we tested everything – operational and financial, manual and system controls (hell I had to do a code review more than once) and those audits were clean as a whistle. The Public Accounting firms decided it was too “expensive to test operational and financial controls” so they eliminated that whole set of testing controls. Once they did that, I got out of financial auditing and went into systems auditing because that was all control work (any idiot can add up numbers and see if they match and it is sooo boring) and I liked the control work better – it was so much more interesting. Controls are where you find out where the problems are, which is a good thing because then management (if they are honest) will fix them. And we couldn’t do all the controls in one year, so we had some key controls that we’d always test and then pick 2-3 other systems to test intensely and rotated the other systems around every year.
After the firms eliminated the controls work, audits became a commodity because they were all the same. So the whomever bid the least, got the job. Once Sarbanes came along, they could charge more for audits, especially in the first year. And the Public Accountants wouldn’t tell you what you should and should not test, so we tested everything – manual and system, operational and financial, some of which failed more than 3 times because they wouldn’t fix the control. Now that they’ve moved it back to just the financial manual controls (hello, people just enter the numbers the computer is the one you should be testing to make sure it went to the right place!), financial audits have become a commodity again. So basically Public Accounting is not doing enough work to make sure the numbers are right, and there will be another Enron soon. Oh wait, it already happened with the banks! And now the SEC is ball-less and won’t go after anyone because the don’t have the resources (thank you Repubs) to do it; their budgets are so tight that they can’t afford anyone in the investigation part of the SEC to do the work. 🙄
Before Enron and Sarbanes, I kept telling people that something horrible was going to happen because they weren’t testing the controls or the computers, I just hoped it wasn’t one of my clients that it happened too. Public Accounting has turned into a useless exercise of adding up number and checking the least amount of controls that they can get away with. They usually spend about 2 weeks doing and audit of a mid size company and 2 days doing systems control work which the financial auditors don’t understand so they never write it up as needing correction, even if it is a major weakness. Within 5 years it’ll happen again.