Opinion: The debt crisis started with Reagan and successive Republicans

Debt ceiling time has come and gone. Again. Have we learned anything yet?

We already knew that the third year of a Democratic president’s first term was the cue for the Republicans to engineer a crisis, in hopes of regaining the White House. In 1995, it was Newt Gingrich and the Contract with America, quickly dubbed Contract on America by the Democrats. It didn’t work. In 2011 the Freedom Caucus, led by Mark Meadows and Ted Cruz, tried to default on the debt. That didn’t work either. Now, in Biden’s third year, the GOP has been exceptionally shrill.

Maybe you didn’t know that in January of 2023, the national debt stood 49.7 times larger than it was when Jimmy Carter was inaugurated in 1977. The average annual growth rate of the debt is 8.8% over those 46 years.

But who did it? Who actually ran up the debt? Has anyone been paying attention? I don’t think so, and I urge you to find a copy of the year-by-year debt table and get out your calculators. All figures listed below are derived directly from the debt table.

President Reagan led the debt parade, increasing the debt at an average annual rate of 14.1%, followed by H.W. Bush at 11.9, W. Bush at 7.4 and Trump at 9.1%.

President Carter led the Democrats with an average annual rate of 10.0%, followed by Clinton at 4.2, Obama at 8.7 and Biden at 5.4%.

More: GOP House members representing Asheville, WNC vote to raise debt ceiling; what they said

Over 24 years in the White House, Republicans collectively multiplied the debt by 11.24. Over 22 years, the Democrats multiplied the debt by 4.42. The product of these two numbers is the number 49.7 cited earlier.

In plain English: Since 1977, Republican administrations have multiplied the debt by a number that is two and a half times the number posted by the Democrats. Yet the Republicans continue to blame the Democrats for running up the debt. How many people have believed them?

It is clear that the GOP prefers to increase the debt by tax cutting and borrowing, as opposed to the social spending and borrowing preferred by the Democrats. Both increase the debt. Reagan put through a massive tax cut, borrowed large amounts to replace the missing revenue, and in the process multiplied the debt by a factor of 2.86 over eight years, a growth rate not exceeded since the second World War. Carter and Obama needed their combined 12 years to match that number. Bill Clinton would have needed 24 years in the White House and still would have fallen short of it. Reagan is by far the worst offender. As Sen. Moynihan said of Reaganomics in 1988:  “We borrowed a lot of money and threw ourselves a party.”

This is not higher mathematics. An excellent project, perhaps, for high school Algebra Two classes, combining math and civics. What a constructive idea!

More: Opinion: Donald Trump is a bully who never grew up, throws tantrums to get what he wants

Our country is not serious about the debt. We appoint commissions to write reports that are ignored. Political talk degenerates into name calling, bomb throwing and lies. For example, comparing debt today to debt 50 years ago is dishonest. In a serious discussion, we would be asking why we borrow, where we would spend the money and when we would pay it back. Only one year since 1957 has seen a reduction in the debt, and that year has conflicting data.

During World War II, the national debt became 3.6 times larger over a period of three years. In normal times, a jump of this size might take 16 years. For many years afterward, income tax rates were extremely high, especially on the wealthiest, and well into the 1950s the debt was reduced, even as the interstate highways were being built. Today, there is no public will to do this.

Too little taxation or too much spending are political issues, but the debt itself is a financial issue. The debt ceiling law is pointless. When not enforced, it has no teeth, but if we enforce it, it’s unconstitutional. We are all subsidized by the national debt, and we must confess to that. If we continue to use the debt as a revolving credit account, we can only hope for an ever-growing economy to bail us out. We now have rising interest rates and slowing economic output, and these are the worst of times for borrowers.

As citizens, if we can’t bridge the politics of the debt, at least we can be honest about the arithmetic.

Perrin Wright is a retired Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at The Florida State University. He lives in Montreat.

This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Republicans multiplied debt crisis double digits in past 2 decades