The barbs exchanged at the State of the Union address remind us of the ease with which each party feels it can blame the other for the worsening of federal indebtedness year after year, Congress after Congress, and presidential administration after administration. These routinized charges are not only counterproductive, they are inaccurate. My comprehensive study of the issue shows that the U.S. has soaring debt not primarily because of actions taken by any current officeholder, but because of a stream of legislation enacted between 1965 and 1972.
The study was motivated by dissatisfaction with the uninformative way these questions are typically discussed in a political context. Partisans, ideologues and interest groups have become adept at framing these questions in ways designed to cast blame on their political opposition. All one needs to do is to only count deficit-increasing actions taken upon the other party’s accession to power, excluding from the picture any previous policy decisions. Presto! The other party is found at fault for the mounting debt.
The only fair and thorough way to analyze the issue is to examine the entirety of the federal budget, quantifying each policy’s contribution to the problem irrespective of when it was enacted. Doing this reveals that nearly three-fifths of the worsening federal fiscal gap is the product of legislation enacted during the aforementioned time period. Specifically, it was spawned by the enactments of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965, along with subsequent expansions of both programs as well as to Social Security in 1971-1972. Astoundingly, all policy decisions combined over the last 50 years have not contributed as much to the widening fiscal gap as the decisions made in those few eventful years.
