Who's Responsible for the Debt?

"If the Democrats inherited any deficit, it was the 2007 deficit, the last of the Republican budgets. That deficit was the lowest in the previous five years, and the fourth straight decline in deficit spending. After that, the Democrats in Congress took control of spending, and that includes Barack Obama, who voted for the wasteful budgets."

--One of those e-mails your Catholic grandfather forwards to you

Is any political trope more overused than the portrayal of Republicans as responsible fiscal conservatives and Democrats as "tax-and-spend" liberals? Well, let's look at how the deficit has changed over time and check whether this claim stands up. (Data taken from the FY2013 budget issued by the OMB.)

(Terminology note: The deficit is the discrepancy between the receipts or revenue the government takes in and the outlays or expenses the government sends out over the course of the (fiscal) year. This is not to be confused with the debt, which is the total amount owed by the government, i.e. the sum of all the deficits less any mythical surpluses over the entire history of the Union.)

Now we can see that the first claim is actually true. The FY2007 budget deficit was in fact the lowest in five years and the fourth-straight decline. It leaves out the fact that in FY2004--the year from which it was declining--Republicans controlled both houses of Congress and the White House. It also fails to mention that the CBO projected that $5.6 trillion would be removed from the national debt from 2002 to 2011, but instead $6.1 trillion was added to the debt due to the economic downturn & associated stimulus spending, the Bush tax cuts, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and other reasons:

Looking at the first chart, we see that deficits more or less increase during the Reagan and Bush administrations and decrease during the Clinton administration to the point of running surpluses. During W. Bush, deficits again increase, peaking in FY2004 before coming down than coming up again for FY 2008 and 2009. Deficits have remained high during the Obama years. (I've started with FY1980 because, with few exceptions, previous deficits cannot be seen on this scale.)

But before we give Clinton too much credit, remember it's Congress that actually passes the budget, so let's see how the deficit changes with the political composition of Congress. We'll add the percentage of Republicans in both the House and the Senate to the chart. (Since Congress should pass the budget for the following fiscal year, the line graphs are offset by a year, e.g. the first points show the budget deficit for FY1980, but the percentage of Republicans in Congress in 1979.)

There does seem to be a trend during the W. Bush years, where more Republicans coincided with reduced deficits. But no such correlation holds over the entire 1980-2011 timeline. We can see this more easily by graphing the deficit against percentage of Republicans directly:

Now we know that having more Republicans doesn't lead (or even tend to lead) to reduced deficits. But maybe you're saying, "But just like it takes a long time to change the course of a large ship, it will take time for Republicans to reduce the deficit. The deficits for which a Republican Congress is supposedly responsible may be caused by policies enacted by Democrats in the previous Congress." Well, that may be so, but if Republicans were serious fiscal conservatives, then they would at least be reducing the deficit even if they can't generate instant surpluses. So instead of graphing the deficit, let's graph the change in the deficit (the first derivative in calculus terms). If anything, that is even more poorly correlated to the number of Republicans:

So what can we conclude? Both Democrats and Republicans are responsible for the size of the national debt. If you're serious about reducing the debt, you shouldn't vote Republican, you should work to repeal the 22nd Amendment and elect Clinton/Gore in 2016.