It is a kind of reasoning that Mitch McConnell presented when Obama first entered office, saying, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” Not to help revamp the middle class or get the economy back on track or end disastrous wars, but to make Obama a one-term president. Here lies the reasoning of the Republican party. Their sole goal is to attack and defeat the Democratic president, and to do this, they complain about issues like inequality or the deficit, and then hijack any proposals that the president advances to address them.
Since the first day Obama stepped into the Oval Office, the federal debt has not only become a catastrophic issue for Republicans, but also one entirely attributed to Obama and the Democrats. This is a major change in heart from a decade earlier, when Republican Vice President Dick Cheney said to Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neil, “You know, Paul, Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.” Indeed, Ted Cruz’s hero Ronald Reagan was the original deficit master.
When Reagan took office, he advocated fiscal responsibility, as his disciples do today. But his presidency was anything but responsible when it came to fiscal policies. The size of America’s debt when he entered office was $1 trillion, and by the end of his two terms, it had grown by 190 percent, to $2.9 trillion, nearly tripling under his leadership. By the the end of twelve years of Reagan-Bush administration, the debt had quadrupled to $4 trillion. Reagan’s policies were ideological in the beginning, and pragmatic towards the end. In his first year in office, he signed major tax cuts into law that were supposed to reduce revenue by $749 billion over five years. This was the “starve the beast” tactic, which the Reagan administration quickly realized was impractical, and the following year signed into law the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982, which was the largest tax increase in American history. For the remaining of his presidency, Reagan backtracked from that initial tax cut, increasing income taxes as well as gasoline and social security taxes, which he would use to fund his runaway spending.
While Reagan’s criticism of Jimmy Carters’ deficit spending helped land him in the office, by the end of his run, spending had only increased in share of national income. Indeed, both Ford and Carter were better at cutting government spending — their presidential terms combined for a 1.4 percent increase of national income, while Reagan’s spending grew 3 percent.
