Quote:
Originally posted by Captain
I'm afraid this is not true. The House came under the control of the Democrats in 1954; that year, the deficit as a percentage of GDP was 0.3%, down from 1.7% in the last year of the Republican Congress. The Democratic house then proceeded to balance the budget on a regular basis into the Nixon Administration (the 1969 budget was in surplus). The data is on the white house site at
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget...s/hist01z3.xls .
It is pretty clear that the Great Society legislation had less to do with the initial budget deficits than the Vietnam War, and the inflation caused first and foremost by the oil embargo during the Ford and Carter administrations also had a huge impact on creating a period of structural deficits in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
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And the deficit under the Carter presidency, with a Dem Congress -- something that Reagan the candidate railed against -- looks like a paragon of fiscal prudence compared to what we've seen under any Repub administration since.
