Taxes can’t remain lower than expenditures

Watching the tea bag parties recently, I agreed that keeping taxes as low as possible is a good idea. But any dream of taxes continuing forever so much lower than expenditures, as they have through 30 years of “conservative” political dominance, is impossible.

We should take a sober look at the huge national debt Barack Obama has inherited, and place responsibility properly.

Despite the widespread belief that we live under “liberal” domination, since 1980 our political conversation has been dominated by right wingers. Bill Clinton’s terms were in that period, but Clinton (be seated for this to guard against injury from a nasty fall) was a moderate. He went out of his way to reassure conservatives that he was not a flaming liberal. Supporting NAFTA was a result of that.

After 1994 there were 12 years of increasingly right-leaning Republican Congresses, six of those years with George W. Bush in the White House. Somebody said those enthusiastic Republicans came to change Washington, but Washington changed them.

When Reagan arrived in 1981, the national debt was a little under $1 trillion. After eight years of Reagan and four of George H.W. Bush, it was over $4 trillion, quadrupled.

The debt growth slowed somewhat during Clinton’s two terms and stood at about $5.5 trillion when George W. Bush came in. His years nearly doubled the national debt to about $10.7 trillion.

Many will claim the conservative Reagan tried his best to hold the line, but the “Democrat Congress” did all of that spending. Nope. It was not a Democratic Congress. The Republicans had the Senate during Reagan’s first six years when his economic program was established, and despite the House being nominally Democratic, Republicans and right wing Southern Democrats held a majority of votes.

(It’s hard to pin the following down, but by some charts, Reagan actually asked for more spending in his budgets than the Congress appropriated. By other arguments, Congress appropriated something like two or three percent more than he asked. The truth probably is somewhere in between, but by either measure, the deficits were about what he asked for.)

Let’s review this. When Reagan came in, the national debt was less than $1 trillion. After 28 years, 20 of them with Republican presidents, the national debt was more than 10 times greater, something like $10.7 trillion. As for Congress, the Republicans controlled both houses more than Democrats did. The rest of the time, control was split.

There is plenty of blame to go around, but during huge deficits and growth of the national debt, the Republicans have been in control of Congress more and the White House much more.
Republican Congresses have failed to balance budgets even when the economy is booming and even made tax cuts while fighting a war.

Unpopular as it is to say it, most of the tax cuts have gone to the wealthiest as they piled up obscene riches.

During that time, there has been great desire to get regulators out of the way of business to let the market do its magic. Government regulation, was not the solution; it was the problem, we were told. The market would regulate itself if left alone.

You know what? That’s right. The market will correct itself if left alone. The problem is that one of its methods of correction is economic depression. Right now we are on the verge of going into one.

And if you have no regulation, you can have worthless securities traded. That got us where we are.

To some people, it’s worth going into a depression or letting people suffer however they must to keep government regulation at bay.

But the government haters among us might look around the world and see some examples of countries that benefit from absence of government.

Somalia is one. Not only is order nonexistent in that country, but it is being used as a base for pirates who attack peaceful shipping. Afghanistan is an example. It has no real national government, and it became the base for the 9/11 attacks on us.

Too-low taxes can mean huge debts, as we have seen, and absence of regulation can get you in real trouble.

And if “conservatives” had not created such huge debt, we could easily afford big borrowing now to revive the economy.

— Thom Anderson is a retired journalist who has 40 years experience with South Carolina newspapers, including the Morning News. He can be reached at .