makes me yearn for the days of the Balanced Budget Amendment.

Excellent post. But, needless to say, the deficits for the rest of Bush's term are projections and probably will come in worse than projected. (Even if there is an economic pick-up, the lowered tax rates assure that much less of the added national income will show up in government revenues.) On the other hand, if Bush is re-elected...

This is wonderful info, and I thank you for compiling it.

In terms of translating the numbers to a message (where the rubber meets the road in politics), you've written a great sentence we might intone as our mantra over the coming year:

"On this scale, Bush ranks as the most irresponsible, recklessly borrowing President in American history."

Agreed: excellent post!

Yeah, democrats need to support some sort of balanced budget amemdment..or at least an almost-balanced budget amendment. I'm sick of cleaning up the messes republicans make.

One question: is your bottom bar chart in error? It shows Reagan as making a very minor addition to the debt, but the numbers in the extended article, unless I'm adding them wrong, show that Reagan was about as bad as Bush I.

Am I missing something?

John- I'm using CBO, not White House projections on likely deficits. Maybe they'll come in higher, especially if war costs mount, but $480 billion in nominal terms next year is a hell of a lot even if they hit the estimates. The estimate is that deficits will fall significantly by 2005, which should be true if any kind of real growth kicks in-- if we do slide back into recession or even just stagnant growth, the numbers could be far worse.

Kevin- "The increase in real deficit over Presidency" chart is kind to Reagan because of the fact that 1989, his last budget, was a very low deficit, $45 billion in real terms.

So while Reagan piled up massive debt in his eight years, he managed to leave with a relatively low yearly real deficit.

This actually highlights why you have to keep your eye on both real deficits and real debt; they tell slightly different stories and you need both to keep track of the real effect of policies on economic and budgetary health.

But obviously Bush Junior is making a hash of the budget by either measure.

Have you considered including debt service (interest payments on the debt) as part of an analysis? Bill Clinton balanced the budget and payed over 15% of budget each year to cover the interest on the debt rung up by Reagan and Bush. The interest costs are a huge drag on the next president in office. If one subtracts the interest payments from 1993 to 2001, total revenue exceeded other spending during the Clinton years. One could argue that the only reason any Clinton budgets were in deficit was due to interest payments.

A couple of points. I notice that deficits numbers have Social Security on budget. In calculating the true debt, the amount the federal government owes to SS and is earmarked for SS spending needs to be counted as part of the debt.

This also makes Reagan look better than he was by about $200 billion dollars. Don't forget that Reagan signed the largest increase in SS taxes every. While cutting taxes on the wealthy, the working class got a rather hefty SS tax hike (which by the way, Mr. Bush has given to his wealthy campaign contributors in the form of income tax cuts.)

Don't these numbers, especially in the first graph, need to be scaled by the size of the
GDP that year? That's what the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities usually does.
That makes the numbers for Reagan and Bush I look less bad, and highlights the amazing
accomplishments of the Clinton administration.

Oh, and Bush II comes out even worse in that analysis.

What a load of crap. Gee, don't take into account ANYTHING but the president? Hmm, the internet economy didn't effect the debt at all, did it? And the internet collapse and 9/11 didn't hurt it at all either, did it?

Nathan is pathetic. And compeltely desperate. The sad part is some of you people actually bought into his crap. Think for yourselves. Don't let biased morons like Nate here just throw big words and graphs at you and get you to believe anything he says.

Can anyone name ONE thing that Clinton did to stimulate the economy in the 90s? Just name one thing he did that actually CAUSED the economy. Please. Show me how it was Clinton and not hte internet that led to the boom. (Then explain why Clinton waited until 1995 to do this, since this is when the economy really started taking off. And also explain why he stopped doing it in MArch 2000 which jsut so happens coincidens with the dot com collapse.)

Clinton's acomplishments were that he happened to be in the right place at the right time. A monkey could have been president and the internet still would have driven the economy.

Thank you, Nathan. That was very informative. If I may quibble about one point: the
"Increase in Real Deficit" would probably be better if it compared the average deficits of
each presidency, rather than merely the last year's deficit. Using your method, if a
recession hits in the last year of a term it makes that President look much worse and his
successor much better. And if the recession hits in the first year, it makes that President
look much worse and his predecessor much better. That is somewhat true even with
averaging, but not as much so.

Dusty: It's not surprising that it took until 1995 for the economy to really start to improve under Clinton. He submitted his first budget at the end of 1993, and didn't get his major deficit-reduction bill passed until '94. But to answer your question, getting the deficit under control was Clinton's single biggest contribution to the economy--by the time the Republicans gained control of Congress, Federal Spending/GDP was lower than at any time in the Reagan/Bush years and the deficit was lower than the interest on the Reagan/Bush debt. Getting the runaway deficit he inherited from Bush under control restored investor confidence and allowed interest rates to stay low dispite a booming economy.
Small things like the Mexican bailout, making pretty good choices on when and how to intervene in labor and trade disputes and applying grants and government spending in the right places also helped.

It's a bit like saying that Jack Welch just picked the right time to be at the helm of GE. There's a little bit of truth to it, but only just a little.

Kyle- the "averaging" of deficits through a Presidency is equivalent to just adding up the total debt added-- which you can see in that chart. It's clear that Reagan added a hell of a lot of public debt in his Presidency.

But it's not unfair to note that by the end of his Presidency, deficits that had risen were being reduced. This was largely because pressure from Democrats and some responsible GOPers (there were some back then) pushed through a number of tax increases to restore fiscal sanity.

Unlike Reagan, Bush is insanely refusing to even discuss new taxes, even down the line, to restore some balance.

Two things Clinton did for the economy:
1. Raised the tax rates on the people who had been sluffing off during Bush-Reagan and got more revenues into the Treasury coffers. It also made him a lot of enemies.
2. Got the minimum wage raised to put more money in the hands of people who actually spend money rather than "invest". Guess where more spending money leads to?

"Got the minimum wage raised to put more money in the hands of people who actually spend money rather than "invest". Guess where more spending money leads to?"

I don't see the logic here. Invested money circles the economy in the same way money spent at 7-Eleven would. Don't take my word for it: try a thought experiment. Invest in an imaginary company. Regardless of what they do, they'll inevitably need employees, who will be paid this "spending money." Just as importantly, they'll need things like pens, Post-It notes, and photocopiers.

It's not as if the wealthy stuff their cash in a mattress, you know. Whether they buy a yacht (built by Joe Schmoe), invest in a company, or just stick their money in the bank, every dollar gets spent, regardless.

I'm still stunned at how many people seem to think that economic growth is just about money changing hands. It's not. REAL increases in overall wealth are about innovation, which is highly fueled by -- you guessed it -- investment.

Side-note: I don't quite follow the claim the author here seems to be making. Am I right in my understanding: do you regard this GDP spike as some sort of mirage? The sector-by-sector breakdown clearly shows that this jump was not fueled by the government.

Oh, also: again, correct me if I'm wrong, Nathan, but aren't you using the CBO model when you say that the deficit is set to hit an unnerving $480 billion? If so, doesn't that SAME model then project drops every year after, eventually resulting in another surplus around 2013 (if memory serves)?

Yes, Chris I'm using the CBO projections, but I frankly don't take any projections more than a year or two out very seriously. We'll see how accurate even the 2004 and 2005 numbers are, but needed to use something, and that was the best bet.

Chris:

1)The government gives tax cuts to the wealthy and the wealthy, in turn, buy treasury bonds to help finance the government deficit; how has that added to net spending circulating in the economy?

2)Though technical innovation is the prime source for increasing productivity and thus the real wealth qua standard of living of a society, financial investment by itself does nothing to guarantee that technical innovation will occur, nor that it will occur efficiently. On the one hand, any technical innovation that is really cost-reducing will effectively finance itself through the increased returns it generates, while, on the other hand, increased investment in capital stock of the same quality will simply come against diminishing returns and prove, in the end, futile. But skewing the distribution of income toward the wealthy, without altering the real productive economy, will increase the monetary valorization of capital assets, since such policies amount to lowering the real wage and increasing the returns to capital, ceteris paribus. Think about it: if the returns to capital stock were increased without altering the actual composition of capital stock, would not the market mechanism increase the valorization of capital stock?

1) You're polarizing. The tax cuts are not merely for the wealthy, and even if they were, the wealthy are doing more with the cuts than simply rolling them over into treasury bonds.

2) True, investment does not guarantee technical innovation; but without investment you can all-but guarantee that it won't occur. The belief that, long term, investment = innovation, seems to me to be pretty sound.

"Yes, Chris I'm using the CBO projections, but I frankly don't take any projections more than a year or two out very seriously. We'll see how accurate even the 2004 and 2005 numbers are, but needed to use something, and that was the best bet."

Fair enough. But surely you see my concern: your cutoff seems a little convenient.

Hell, inaccurate projections could mean the actual numbers are better than expected, too. Let's not forget that the OMB overshot with this year's deficit projection by about $75 billion.

This is all completely apart from whether or not the deficit, regardless of size, is really a cause for concern in the first place.

Chris:

Do you acknowledge the constraints and effects of actual quantitative parameters? 1) The largest share of the tax cuts went to the well-to-do. One can discuss the impact of the middle-class tax cuts separately- and in a recession, they are the proper thing to do. But "polarizing"? Did not a significant quantity of the tax cuts for the wealthy figure to end up exactly as indicated? 2)Is there a shortage of investment capital to finance actually effective capital improvements so as to render tax cuts "necessary" for capital investment and, if so, how should they be targeted? To the contrary, there seems to have been a glut of capital improving investment, since we are now facing a situation of rising productivity rates and stagnant employment.