The desk I sit at each day is spit-shined walnut with a tempered glass overlay. Atop this is a single layer of papers. Atop that is another layer of papers and atop that … you get the idea.
One of the papers is a chart prepared by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. It’s in three colors, black, blue and red. It charts the progress (blue line) and regress (red line) of the national budget deficit since the days of John Kennedy. The chart has a median horizontal red line across its middle that represents a balanced budget. So you get an idea of how wrong we went and under whom. Good years—they were few—show in blue line above the median. Bad years, in red, below the “balanced budget” line.
JFK’s budget is largely balanced. Lyndon’s is OK until near the end of his second term (so to speak), when it dropped to a $25 billion loss then quickly recovered so that the old geezer left office with a razor thin surplus budget (3 bill) he turned over to Nixon who speedily set a post-war deficit record of $74 bill until recouping in his last budget.
Gerald Ford added $68 billion to the national debt.
Carter rolled along in thin red ink hitting a low figure of $74 bill.
Then Ron Reagan, whose regime took the 74 bill deficit and turned it into a $221 billion deficit.
George Bush ran the deficit to a record low of $290 billion.
At this point the chart is marked by two nearly vertical lines, one blue and the other red. The blue line is Bill Clinton’s annual budgets, the blue indicating improvement over the last figure. This line, indicating reductions in deficit spending each year runs up and off the chart with a record $236 billion surplus. The year before he had a $126 billion dollar surplus. But Clinton’s time was running out and it was George W. Bush’s turn.
Where Clinton’s blue line ran straight up the chart to surplus-land, Bush’s line is red and it runs straight down the chart to Deficit Hell.
At the end of his first term, the annual deficit hit $413 billion. The Republicans noted that it wasn’t as bad as predicted. Check. It must be noted that it’s six-hundred billion worse than the Clinton legacy.
These figures had nothing to do with the Bush folly in Iraq. Through D. C. mystery-speak those huge numbers are off budget. Another trillion dollars, it is said, could be added to Bush’s profligacy.
So here we have it: JFK, Johnson, Carter and Clinton ran the government on a small deficit/large surplus basis.
The Republicans—Ford, Reagan, Bush I and Bush II—expanded government and piled on the debt in record-breaking amounts.
The sad part of this is that the Tom DeLay, Jack Abramoff, Carl Rove Republicans threw a party then left town for the Democrats to clean the house.
The cost is running to trillions, all put on the back of Barack Obama. We’ve been giving blacks the dirty jobs for a long time now. |
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