There is a certain kind of Republican partisan that has no problem blaming the Dems for the nation’s hideous fiscal calamity. That’s because the Dems frequently advocate even worse profligacy than we already have, as per Biden’s Build Back Better Boondoggle, for instance.
But that’s a cop out. For crying out loud, the Dems are the Government Party in the American scheme of democracy, while the GOP is supposed to be the fiscal Opposition Party that contests the spending schemes of the former and thereby keeps the nation’s fiscal accounts reasonably in check.
Stated differently, in their wisdom our Madisonian founders designed a scheme of national government that was sluggish on purpose—riddled with checks and balances that would ensure that the Federal government could act and expand only with great difficulty and much legislative friction along the way.
Accordingly, the fact that the public debt has now reach nearly $31 trillion (market value basis) and is growing by leaps in bounds speaks for itself: Given every constitutional advantage and impediment to legislative action—such as passing new entitlement measures or debt ceiling increases—the nation’s soaring public debt must be laid on the GOP’s doorstep. That’s because the debt explosion represents the failure of the fiscal opposition party to have the courage of its fiscal convictions, or, in recent years, any fiscal convictions at all.
Thus, since the spring of 1971 when Tricky Dick Nixon announced “we are all Keynesians now” the debt and debt share of GDP has been spirallying off-the-charts because effectively the GOP has betrayed the old time fiscal religion which was its watchword during the heyday of American prosperity after mid-century.
Since then, the public debt (blue line) has risen by 77X, from $400 billion to $30.7 trillion. By contrast, GDP is up by only 20X, meaning that the debt share of GDP (red line) has soared from its post-war low of 33% in 1971 to a crushing 126% today.
Total Public Debt At Market Value And % of GDP, 1971-2021
For want of doubt, consider what happened during the Eisenhower era, when the White House was occupied by an advocate of the old time fiscal religion. Ike managed to shrink real defense spending by more than one-third; eschew any major expansion of domestic spending except for the Interstate Highway System, which we fully funded with user fees (gas taxes); and balance the budget during most of his eight years in office.