"the DEMS had the house through all of Raygun and Bush years"
Conservatives are embarassed by the way Reagan and the Bushes ran the debt up and out of control .. http://zfacts.com/p/318.html . So they have invented a cover story: The Democratic Congress did it. I have run into this lie dozens of times. So, I dug deep to set the record straight.
As the figure shows, Reagan and Bush senior got almost exactly the budgest they requested in each of their 12 budget years.
* Reagan: * The first budget — passed by all Republicans and a few conservative Southern Democrats. [my emphasis]
-- INSERT: [ rather than majority of which party that counts it's the voting numbers that are crucial, eh .. e.g. it some cases all of minority Republicans and just enough conservative southern Democrats do swing a bill ] --
----- * This increased the debt by $144 Billion.(1) [ paraphrase inside (1) inside - prev. record Carter 90b, only 3b higher than Ford ]
*The next 5 budgets — passed by the Republican Senate and signed by Reagan. * The last 2 budgets — passed by a Democratic Congress ----- Totalled slightly less than Reagan requested.
*G. H. W. Bush: Democratic Congresses under Bush passed smaller budgets than he requested in 3 out of 4 years. These four Democratic budgets totalled $14.6 Billion less than Bush requested. G. W. Bush: * The first two budgets — Senate was split 50/50 and the House was Democratic. ----- * Bipartisan and totalled $20 Billion less than Bush requested. ----- * The biggest cause of deficits was Bush’s enormous tax cut, mainly for the rich. * The next 4 budgets — the Congress was solid Republican. * The last 2 budgets — Bush vetoed(2) modest Democratic attempts at spending.
In summary: Democrats controlled Congress during 8 out the 20 years. During 4 of those years, Democrats decreased the budgets proposed by the Republican presidents. Their total effect during those 8 years was to reduce Republican budgets by $17 Billion (which is only 0.2%).
Sources:
September 20, 2010. I finally tracked down exactly what Congress did. There were a few scattered cites on the web to a mysterious House report from 1992, but I could never find it., So a few days ago, I pulled together my best clues and wrote to the help desk at the Library of Congress. They nailed it in less than a day. Amazing. There is no such report, but they found a table with that name that is published annually and has all the budget results going back to the 1920s or so. (From the government printing office .. http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/GPO-CDOC-107sdoc18/pdf/GPO-CDOC-107sdoc18-1-12-4.pdf .xlnk.gif)
You can read in Time magazinexlnk .. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,922584,00.html .gif how Reagan outmanuevered the Democrats to get his first budget passed. This is the budget that ended the 32 year payoff of the WWII debt and sent the national debt spinning out of control (except for a brief turn-around under Clinton).
From the G. W. Bush White House: The Reagan-Bush Debt Explained
“The traditional pattern of running large deficits only in times of war or economic downturns was broken during much of the 1980s. In 1982 [Reagan’s first budget year], partly in response to a recession, large tax cuts were enacted. However, these were accompanied by substantial increases in defense spending. Although reductions were made to nondefense spending, they were not sufficient to offset the impact on the deficit. As a result, deficits averaging $206 billion were incurred between 1983 and 1992. These unprecedented peacetime deficits increased debt held by the public from $789 billion in 1981 to $3.0 trillion (48.1% of GDP) in 1992.” [emphasis added]
From “Historical Tables, Budget of the U.S. Government, Fiscal Year 2006.” Downloaded from www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2006/pdf/hist.pdf. Page 5.
How the GOP Became the Party of the Rich .. bit .. Republicans, abetted by conservative Democrats, passed the tax cuts with a veto-proof majority, and Clinton signed them into law. But for the remainder of his term, Clinton repeatedly blocked Republican demands for further cuts. "He vetoed one tax cut after another," says Robert McIntyre, director of Citizens for Tax Justice. In 1999, in a triumph for fiscal sanity, Clinton rejected a massive $792 billion cut to inheritance and investment taxes. The mood during the veto ceremony in the Rose Garden was festive. A five-piece band played "Summertime," and the living was easy. Unemployment stood at 4.2 percent, and stocks were booming. "Our hard-won prosperity gives us the chance to invest our surplus to meet the long-term challenges of America," Clinton declared. The Republican tax cuts, he warned with eerie prescience, would return America to a period of "deficit upon deficit" that culminated in "the worst recession since the Great Depression." .. http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=69085167
Market Data 
Markets 
AI
