Aseahawkfan wrote:As far as I recall, the large deficits started during the Reagan Era in the 80s. Now it's reached an out of control, insane state no one wants to fix because of how difficult that would be. I think we'll go bankrupt first while the politicians keep spending money we don't have and the Republicans keep cutting taxes we can't afford to give up.
The birth of the large federal budget deficits occurred under Johnson with his "Great Society", which among many other things, gave us two very expensive entitlement programs, Medicare and Medicade, along with an insufficient means to support them. Additionally, he was pumping out legislation and creating entire departments before they even had a mission. By the time Reagan took office, the combination of an aging population, exploding medical costs, and the Vietnam War had put a huge drain on government expenditures, put a whole lot of returning soldiers in the VA that otherwise wouldn't have been there, and so forth. By the time Reagan came to town, the entitlement monster had grown to include over 80% of federal spending, and with his wanting to expand the defense budget, which during the height of the cold war was a necessary evil, he didn't come close to even submitting a balanced budget.
The other thing that Johnson did was to put Social Security "on budget", meaning that it's revenues and expenditures counted towards calculating the deficit, and since that self sustaining program in 1968 took in way more money than it paid out, made LBJ's overall budget look healthier that it actually was even though they still reported a deficit even after including SS.
Bottom line is that you can't simply point to the year that the budget deficit started rising and blame who ever was sitting in the Oval Office at the time. You have to take a look at the root case of the deficit, when did the programs causing it begin.