This month, Democrats in Congress will be faced with the task of raising or suspending the debt limit to avoid a default on our national debt. Apparently, they will have to do it with no Republican votes since Republicans appear willing to sabotage the economy to score a political point.
A recent campaign message from Congressman French Hill asked whether it was time to get spending under control and stating that "Liberals in the House continue to push their one-size-fits-all, big-government give aways [sic] like the 'Build Back Better' bill."
This is Hill's version of the Republican line that our national debt and deficit are due to "liberal" spending by Democrats.
Hill's is only one voice repeating the misrepresentation. Recent op-eds in this paper have decried an increase in the national debt limit as an effort to allow Democrats more opportunity to spend.
Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy set a record for the longest House speech in modern history, taking more than eight hours to denounce the Democrats' Build Back Better bill for excessive spending and its impact on the national debt. Trying to blame the national debt on Democratic spending has become a persistent part of current Republican efforts to block the Biden agenda.
The facts, however, demonstrate that these claims are objectively false. The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette recently published graphs of the national debt since 1940 that show how far from reality Republican claims are. (You can also Google "national debt since 1940" to see the figures.)
From a high in 1946 of about 120 percent of GDP, the result of the Depression and World War II, the debt came down steadily until it was about 30 percent of GDP in 1980. It is worth noting that we did not pay down the debt between 1946 and 1980; we outgrew it. There were only a few balanced budgets during this period, most followed by a recession. Still, the total debt was under $1 trillion in 1980 when Ronald Reagan hit the fan.
The debt had tripled by the time Reagan left office. Seeing the effects of tax cuts in his first term, Reagan pushed some increases in his second, but in very pointed ways. When the dust settled from the Reagan years, the poorest 60 percent of Americans had seen their taxes actually go up and only the richest 1 percent got a significant tax cut. (This was documented in a series of New York Times articles in the early '90s.)
The debt had hit about $26 trillion, well over 120 percent of GDP, before Biden's election, it appears mostly due to Republican tax cuts. No "liberal" spending programs were passed by Democrats in that period--the ACA saves money.
It is also worth noting that the last balanced budgets seen were achieved during the Clinton years, but George W. Bush--I believe the worst president ever before Trump--got back into deficit with a major tax cut going mostly to the richest 1 percent before 9/11. Republicans doubled the debt in Bush's eight years and took us into a near depression by failing to regulate abuses in the financial industry.
President Obama was overly cautious in response to the economic disaster he inherited because of his reluctance to increase the deficit even more. He was bringing it down in his second term when Trump was elected and Republicans took over Congress. Their massive tax cut brought the deficit screaming back. The debt has gone up considerably since Biden's election due mostly to the pandemic.
Now with Democrats trying to spend some money to improve the lives of ordinary Americans, Republicans have their panties in a wad over the debt. It is amazing that Republicans can demand to know how Democrats are going to pay for their spending programs, but were never required to say what spending they would reduce to pay for their tax cuts.
Increasing the debt limit is not about new spending; it is about paying for what Republicans have run up since 1980.
I'm sorry this is complicated and full of numbers, but the facts matter.
Roger A. Webb of Little Rock is a retired professor of psychology from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.