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14 Responses to “The Party of Limited Government”
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At first I thought it was a graph from GraphJam again until I saw the credit to Sullivan. Haha, jokes on me I guess.
They keep using that word limited. I do not think it means what they think it means.
[...] via The Agitator. [...]
For a wage earner in a family of 3, about $4,000/yr is added to his taxes by the interest that must be paid. This doesn’t pay anything on the principal. Debt of this magnatude has de-valued the dollar so that coffee costs $7 a bag. This has consequences. The rapid fall in the dollar’s value has stimulated speculation. When we pump gas at $4/gal we are paying roughly $1.50 to $2.00/gal as a tax imposed by the likes of the Saudi Royals, Vladimir Putin or Chavez.
Of course, our vice president has said that ‘Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.’
Good work!!
I wonder what proportion of that is military spending.
Proof that neither party is pro limited government for sure. Reagan and up each adding, roughly 1 trillion to the tab. Though I find it amusing they chose 1968 as the starting year, given it was the start of the “war on poverty” aka Johnson’s Great Society.
I’ll agree that Republicans cannot claim to be leaders in fiscal responsiblity, but I don’t think that the government debt has much to do with how limited government is.
At least, it would never occur to me to use government debt as a meausure of how limited and intrusive government is in an individual’s life.
There are better ways of illustrating the issue. First, plot deficit growth rate against time, and against Republicans in office. Second, plot the fastest growing Federal programs versus time and then against the party that passed the program.
What you’ll find is that the programs throwing Federal finance into the crapper are, with the exception of the prescription benefit boondoggle, Democratic inventions.
If Libertarians were in power today, I doubt that they would muster enough support to peel back Social Security, Medicare, AFDC, Food Stamps, block grants, various specialized programs, etc. However, if Libertarians ever obtain a Congressional majority, then they will also be subject to the timeline graph.
chsw
How about you post a graph that’s inflation-adjusted? It might provide an accurate representation of the situation. It’s not that debt is good, but it hasn’t increased nearly as fast as that graph indicates.
[...] Republicans were the party of smaller government? [...]
Another bit of Reagan’s economic brilliance: “Defense is not a budget item.”
For the anti-Reagan comments……correct me if I’m wrong (but I’m not) he had 8 budgets that were declared DOA by the Democrat-controlled congress……
“How about you post a graph that’s inflation-adjusted?”
I partially agree with you, but there is more than a simple a correlation between inflation and national debt. If an increase in debt causes inflation to increase faster, then an inflation-adjusted graph would basically be missing information.
As I understand it LBJ spent the “Social Security Trust Fund” on the Great Society first, then started to borrow money for those programs, and Vietnam.
Reagan had a Democratic congress to help him spend money, and Clinton had a Republican one to help him not spend money.