Questionable legacies
For almost a century now the Republican Party has presented itself as the party of fiscal responsibility, spending restraint, tight budgets and low taxes. But that’s simply not true and never was.
Doubters are encouraged to check the record. Let’s begin with right-wing icon Ronald Reagan’s economic policies and results.
When Reagan assumed office in 1981 he increased the budget deficit he had originally promised to cut from $70 billion to $175 billion by overspending on defense but refusing to raise the necessary taxes to pay for the increases. He suggested the Democrats might cut social spending to make up the deficit. Dream on, Ron. Everybody promises to cut pork, but nobody does it. At the end of his two terms Reagan left taxpayers the largest deficit of any president since World War II.
Reagan’s successor George H. W. Bush made little effort to balance the budget during his four years and left Bill Clinton a deficit of $300 billion. Amazingly, Democrat Clinton produced four balanced budgets out of eight and left George W. Bush a healthy surplus, which he promptly squandered on his foolish, unnecessary Iraq War and lopsided tax cuts for the wealthiest individuals. George W.’s legacy? He was our only president ever to have declared war and cut taxes in the same year. Even worse, he left Obama with a deficit of $1.2 trillion and a failing economy, the worst since the Great Depression.
After turning the economy around with some bold, strategic bailouts early in his first four years, President Obama presided over 16 uninterrupted quarters of economic and job growth and left his successor, Donald Trump, with a sound, healthy, growing economy. Trump then brazenly took credit for the already completed economic turnaround that he had nothing to do with. But why did we let him get by with it?
Of all Trump’s foolish legacies, probably the most damaging in the long run is the $7.8 trillion increase in our national debt amassed during his four short years. This amounts to $23,500 per U.S. citizen. But unlike George W. Bush and Abraham Lincoln, who created larger debts, Trump had no wars to pay for.
Modern Republican presidents, beginning with Reagan, in their first year have pushed through tax cuts favoring the wealthiest individuals to reward their campaign contributors. Then they leave the next Democratic administration the unpleasant task of raising the taxes necessary to keep us from going broke. Hence, the pejorative “Taxandspendocrats.”
Today our national debt has reached frightening levels relative to our economic production, nearly as high as it was at the end of World War II. But unlike back then, the enormously increasing expenses of Social Security and Medicare will make it more difficult to dig ourselves out of this ever-deepening morass of indebtedness.
When Trump took office in 2017, in true Republican supply-side economics tradition, he predicted the growth created by his 2017 corporation and individual tax cuts and the new tariffs he proposed would begin to pay down the enormous national debt. Instead, the deficit soared to 3.8% of GDP in 2018 and 4.6% the following year.
Over the years the legacy of the “taxand-spend Democrats” has progressively evolved. But I’ll ask again: Which is more damaging to our nation’s economy and fiscal integrity — tax-and-spend Democrats or borrow-and-spend Republicans?