Just Who's Responsible For Fiscal Mismanagement?

Presidents have long been given the credit, and the blame for the status of the budget they oversee on a year to year basis.

I’ve seen this wikipedia article a number of times for example, as well as many charts which tend to focus on the president, his party, and the resulting budget.

This is what is in the public’s consciousness - and I suppose its understandable.  The president does propose the budget annually, afterall.

But its hardly where people should look when they want to assign credit and blame.  The president may propose the budget, but the purse strings have always lied with Congress.  They can summarily reject the president’s budget, they can roll over and accept it, they can play a chess game and force the president to change his budget priorities - and in the end, they can amend it to their heart’s content to shape it how they wish.  Congress is the true target we should look to for scorn, or praise.

As such, I decided to take a gander at the congressional makeup a the time budgets were approved, and found some rather interesting facts.  For the record, I’m using 1900 to today from the historical charts in the 2009 budget for my facts and figures on this - obviously this is not the complete picture, but gives us a relatively good idea of what’s going on.

One more important note, the year I am using for each figure is the actual year the budget was passed, not the fiscal year budget.  In other words, I have 2008 down, but the figures used are for the Fiscal Year 2009 budget.  This is basically because the congressman in the year 2008 are the people who passed the FY09 budget, so regardless of its label, I’m assigning the figures to the year it was passed, so we can see which congress passed it.

Some interesting notes:

• In the 38 years since 1900 that the Republican Party has had complete control over the Congress, they have been responsible for twenty-three surplus budgets, and fifteen deficit budgets.
• The complete record of Republican congresses has a net deficit of more than one trillion dollars ($1,072,594,000).  That represents a roughly $28,226,157,895 deficit for every budget they are responsible for.
• In the 58 years since 1900 that the Democratic Party has had complete control over the Congress, they have been responsible for seven surplus budgets, fifty deficit budgets, and 1 budget with no data available.
• The complete record of Democratic congresses has a net deficit of more than three trillion dollars ($3,305,777,000,000).  That represents a roughly $57,996,087,719 deficit for every budget they are responsible for.
• In the thirteen years since 1900 that Congress has been divided, only once did they generate a surplus, the other twelve years, they ran a deficit of 107.5 billion dollars per budget.
• If you are jaded about those Republican numbers being weighted due to heavy representation from the first 50 years of the century, consider this:
  • In the eleven years of complete Republican control between 95-00 and 02-06, they ran four surplus budgets, and seven deficit budgets.
  • Of their deficit budgets, five of them ran deficits that were decreases from the previous year’s deficit numbers (often times by a lot).  There were only two years (out of eleven) when a Republican congress ran higher deficits than the year previous, and those years were 2002 and 2003 - and you might correctly identify the party’s adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq in the post-9/11 environment as the cause of those budget deficits.
  • In those eleven years, the party has averaged a $98,981,727,273 deficit while they controlled the purse strings.
• At the same time, you may be wondering about the effect of World War II and the Great Depression on hurting the Democratic numbers.  For fairness’ sake, lets take a look at the last 11 years of complete Democratic control.
  • In the last 11 years of complete Democratic control (from much of the 80s, early 90s and the last two years), they have run zero surpluses and eleven deficits.
  • Of those deficit budgets, four were decreases from the previous year’s deficit, and seven were increases from the previous year’s deficit.  Of the seven years that were increases from the previous, there was no major military operation, major social spending initiative (such as the Great Society or the New Deal), the only culprit was Reagan’s request for a military buildup.  You would think, however, that under such circumstances, they would find ways to work to decrease expenditures in other areas, as Reagan requested.
  • In those eleven years, the party has averaged a $237,002,181,818 deficit in each of their budgets.

Interesting fact, no?

Lets get something straight - the Republican record on spending in the six years of Bush’s presidency has been abysmal.  It has been the single most disappointing thing I have seen in his tenure, and it disturbs me greatly that the party is more interested in the status quo than real reform, especially given what the Republican Revolution in 1994 was all about.

However, let us not use that utter disappointment with the Republican behavior of late to obscure the fact that in the grand scheme of things, Republican control of Congress has acted much more responsibly than the Democrats have, and frankly its not even close.

It doesn’t matter if you are looking over trends from the previous 100 years, or the previous 20, its not even debatable - when Democrats control the purse strings, they run deficits because they are unwilling to reform entitlements, cut spending, slow down the growth of the budget, and have new entitlement missions as pet projects that they insist on instituting, but not paying for.

Consider again, in the last 11 years it has been in control, the Democrats average about 237 billion dollars in deficits, while the Republicans average only 98 billion (and it should be noted, the first two years of their reign, they were slashing the deficit by huge margins as they worked toward balancing it in 1997, and the 2001 budget was devestated by the .com bubble crash, so really even that 98 billion figure is misleadingly large).  Consider again that more than half of the budgets congressional Republicans pass are in surplus over the last 100 years, while only 14% of Democratic budgets are in surplus.

For a complete look at the chart, please review it here.

Oh, and by the way, these numbers don’t take into account the new trillion dollar binge spending spree Congress wants to go on for a “bailout”.  Add that in for an even more damning indictment of Democratic spending priorities.

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NOTE:  Cross Posted at Political Capital