National Debt

I decided to do an analysis of which political party is the most fiscally responsible. I've always felt that one of the cheif complaints by Republicans against Democrats was that Democrats spent to much money on social programs and such. They gave too much of the Rich People's money away to poor people who didn't deserve it. Maybe some of that is my own personal bias, but that is the impression I've always gotten. Anyway, I decided to do some of my own research to find out if this is true or not. I took information on our national debt from the Bureau of Public Debt website (note the .gov suffix on the URL), and information about when the Presidents were in power from another website. The dates on which the national debt was reported didn't match up exactly with the presidential transitions in power, so the numbers below aren't completely accurate, but they're as close as I could get with the resources I had available.

Another good reference is http://www.federalbudget.com/, which displays a graph that shows where the federal money goes (a little less than 1/3 of our taxes goes to pay the interest on the national debt), and http://www.kowaldesign.com/budget/, which shows a graph of how our national debt has increased over time.

Below is a table showing our most recent presidents, and the amount the debt increased during their term. Republican presidents have a red background, Democratic, blue. The key column is the right-most column, which shows the average increase of the debt per year of the presidents term.

President	Starting Debt	Ending Debt	Increase/Year
George W. Bush	$5,674,178,209,886.86	$7,616,792,798,166.73	$431,692,130,728.86
Bill Clinton	$4,064,620,655,521.66	$5,674,178,209,886.86	$201,194,694,295.65
George Bush Sr.	$2,602,337,712,041.16	$4,064,620,655,521.66	$365,570,735,870.13
Ronald Reagan	$930,210,000,000.00	$2,602,337,712,041.16	$209,015,964,005.15
Jimmy Carter	$653,544,000,000.00	$930,210,000,000.00	$69,166,500,000.00
Gerald Ford	$492,665,000,000.00	$653,544,000,000.00	$53,626,333,333.33
Richard Nixon	$358,028,625,002.91	$492,665,000,000.00	$26,927,274,999.42
Lyndon B. Johnson	$303,470,080,489.27	$358,028,625,002.91	$9,093,090,752.27
John F. Kennedy	$290,216,815,241.68	$303,470,080,489.27	$6,626,632,623.80
Dwight D. Eisenhower	$266,071,061,638.57	$290,216,815,241.68	$3,018,219,200.39

The results here are kind of surprising, at least for me. I had always thought that Ronald Reagan was a big spender, but he pales in comparison to later presidents, both Republican and Democratic. It's possible that my impression that Republicans thought that Democrats spend too much may have come from the Carter administration, though I'm not really sure. Certainly, the biggest increases were during Republican terms where the general trend seems to be that each Republican President about doubles the previous President's deficit. But the real trend seems to be a simple increase over time, that's not definitively tied to either party.

I'd like to point out that according to the graphs on http://www.kowaldesign.com/budget/, some of the highest deficits (not counting G.W.Bush) were during the early part of Clinton's term, but these were offset by actual surpluses during the end of his term. I was tempted to try to say that it took Bill a few years to turn around the policies of his predecessor, but now I'm beginning to think that maybe this was simply due to he and Congress being too preoccupied with the Monica Lewinsky scandal to spend a lot of money.