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.
|
We had slight surpluses in 1960 and 1969. Every other year was deficits. We did not get sustained surpluses until the Repubicans took over. There were plenty of times of growth when the Dems controlled congress and we did not pull out of our deficists.
And if you are going to blame Vietnam, funny that we are in war on terror right now.
