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Politics : Mainstream Politics and Economics -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JBTFD who wrote (14756)	4/5/2012 4:18:24 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 85487

thus no one previously could have deficit spent to the tune of a trillion. True but real dollars are more important for this purpose than nominal dollars, and usually percentage of the GDP for the deficits is more important than real dollars. The highest deficits as a percentage of GDP in order by president (not really the best measure of things, because you have to consider congress, and also the conditions, but its commonly used, so I'll go with it for now) is FDR/early Truman for the WWII deficits, then a sizable drop to Wilson for the WWI deficits, then another sizable drop to Lincoln for the Civil War deficits, then a slight drop to Obama, then a sizable drop to Reagan/Bush I, then a bit of a drop to Bush II. Of course FDR for example, had a good reason to have very high deficits. As I've said earlier in the post and in other posts, just looking at the president isn't a good way to try to assign partisan blame. But the point is I'm not trying to assign partisan blame here, I'm just pointing out that deficit spending has a long pedigree in the country (back to the beginning of the country), and major deficits outside of wars as a near perpetual thing goes back to at least FDR (true he had a very major war, but he had large deficits before WWII, and deficits continued almost uninterrupted since then, even if at times they where very modest, small enough for the debt to decrease as a percentage of GDP since the deficit was at times smaller than the increase in GDP)