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Conservatives have long been embarrassed ⁽¹⁾By 1987 Ron Paul was asking “How is it that the party of balanced budgets, with control of the White House and Senate, accumulated red ink greater than all previous administrations put together? by Reagan running the debt up and out of control, so they made up a cover story — “the Democratic Congress did it.” But as this graph shows, Congress changed the presidents’ budgets only a tiny bit, and mostly down not up — Congress reduced Reagan’s spending by $16 billion over his eight budget years. In spite of Congressional reductions, Reagan increased the debt by $1,860 billion. Blaming that on Congress is just political deception.  More + Documentation

What if Reagan and the Bushes had balanced their budgets?  It’s easy to find the answer. The Treasury records the “debt to the penny” almost every day, so we can get most of the answer by just looking up the debt on the first day of Reagan’s first budget and subtracting that from the debt on the last day of Bush senior’s last budget. Do the same for G. W. Bush. That comes to $9.5 Trillion, and then there’s some interest. It’s amazing what the supply siders did to the Republican party — once conservative, now radical revolutionaries.

In the Great Depression business conservatives scared people about inflation (there was none) and about government borrowing (tiny until WWII). And that’s why the Great Depression lasted 12 years. Then came WWII and the the US started to borrow and spend like crazy. ⁽²⁾Back in WWII we had real Patriots. They loved Uncle Sam and they bought war bonds to help him borrow to win the war and put America back to work. Now those who hate Uncle Sam (even though they say we have the best government in the world) call themselves patriots. But they have simply been duped by the Koch brothers and Wall Street. The effect was immediate, and the economy rocketed from depression to super boom. ⁽³⁾And, no this was not because our competitors were flattened, that was latter and it hurt our economy. We spent a lot helping them reconstruct and there was no one to buy our exports. When you hear someone give this excuse you know they started with their conclusion and just made up a “reason.” Two slide shows and a video explain where our debt came from and why the supply-side debt makes it much harder for us to use spending to get out of this recession.

1.	↥	By 1987 Ron Paul was asking “How is it that the party of balanced budgets, with control of the White House and Senate, accumulated red ink greater than all previous administrations put together?
2.	↥	Back in WWII we had real Patriots. They loved Uncle Sam and they bought war bonds to help him borrow to win the war and put America back to work. Now those who hate Uncle Sam (even though they say we have the best government in the world) call themselves patriots. But they have simply been duped by the Koch brothers and Wall Street.
3.	↥	And, no this was not because our competitors were flattened, that was latter and it hurt our economy. We spent a lot helping them reconstruct and there was no one to buy our exports. When you hear someone give this excuse you know they started with their conclusion and just made up a “reason.”